On Aug 31, 2011, at 2:31 AM, John C Klensin wrote: > --On Tuesday, August 30, 2011 14:51 -0700 Fred Baker > <f...@cisco.com> wrote: > >>> What's also not fair game is to "raise the bar" - to expect >>> the document at DS to meet more stringent criteria than it >>> was required to meet at the time of PS approval. >> >> Hmmm, the "demonstrated interoperability" requirement of DS/IS >> is in fact a raising of the bar,and one that has served us >> well. We don't (although IMHO we should) require even an >> implementation to go to PS. > > I know it is controversial, but there is at least one other area > in which we should be raising the bar for DS/IS by dropping the > bar for Proposed. If we really want to get PS specs out quickly > while the percentage of people who easily write very high > quality technical English in the IETF continues to go down, we > need to stop the behavior of various IESG members simulating > technical editors or translators to "fix" PS text (or insisting > that the author or WG do so, which, IMO, is less bad but still > often a problem). Doing that will get documents out faster, > perhaps even a lot faster in some cases, but will inevitably > result in PS documents that need significant editorial work > before being approved at DS.
Given that people commonly implement and deploy Proposed Standards in products, sometimes even prior to their approval as Proposed Standards, I think this is a very bad idea. I think it's likely to create interoperability problems between PS and DS versions of products, and sometimes between implementations of the same PS version. For better or worse, the widespread desire to implement at PS (recommendations in 2026 notwithstanding) pretty much forces IETF to try to produce high quality prose at PS. I agree that IESG should not generally be acting as technical editors, so maybe IETF needs to find some way to provide technical editors who are proficient in technical English before documents are reviewed by IESG. Documents written by native English speakers would also benefit. Maybe the GEN-ART review could be expanded, or maybe the RFC Editor could assume some role here (awkward though that might be at first). Keith _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf