On Sun, 2013-05-05, John C Klensin wrote: > Finally, there are a few things that we used to do, that were > helpful, and that were abandoned due to industry evolution and > changes in priorities. The original idea of a Proposed Standard > as a fairly rough specification that would be used for study and > evaluation on the basis of implementation experience, not a spec > from which products were built, is one that has been mentioned > (although not quite in that way).
FWIW, this leads me to the thought that the IETF may have a terminology problem. The word "standard" is used too soon in the maturity levels of RFCs. I think that our skills are primarily in producing "protocols" rather than "standards". Perhaps it would have been better if the names of the maturity levels were something like: Proposed Protocol Test Version 1 Protocol Test Version 2 protocol . . . Standard Protocol Only using the word "standard" when it was determined to be stable and recommended for wide usage. Anyway, my 2 cents. -- Bill McQuillan <mcqui...@pobox.com>