I think trying to cite IANA registries is a distraction. IANA registries are *not* enough. To meaningfully define a codepoint, you need to say what the codepoint means. That's why our IANA registries have document references. Moreover, to be well-defined, it needs to be a TLS-specific document, not just the underlying crypto, to write the small handful of TLS-specific definitions needed to glue things together.
Now, *those* documents are candidates for citing, and our registries *do* sometimes reference drafts, as they do here. One *could* argue that people should just be OK citing drafts. But I cannot *entirely* blame folks for being reticent to cite drafts when the IETF spends so much energy to emphasize that drafts are not done. They have expiry, there is no indication whether people expect to define a new one with different semantics, etc. For things that the IETF *does* intend to publish, we have all spent quite a lot of energy making sure people downstream of us know that it's not "official" until it's published. We all did this because it's harmful for standards work if people freeze intermediate snapshots that aren't done. We can't have it both ways. Either we tell everyone that drafts are perfectly fair game to implement, with no stopgap against people inadvertently ossifying things that aren't yet done, or there must be ways for drafts to progress into a state that signals they are done. That durable state doesn't have to be an RFC, but it's the only one the IETF has defined right now. One could say, ah, the problem is the IETF needs to define a non-RFC end state, and that *that's* not TLS WG's business. But it *is* very much the TLS WG's business that we're worrying about this at all, because we've managed to spend a disproportionate amount of time waffling on technically trivial documents. On Thu, Apr 2, 2026 at 6:10 PM Richard Barnes <[email protected]> wrote: > Not a problem for the TLS WG to solve in any case. > --RLB > > On Thu, Apr 2, 2026 at 12:05 PM Nico Williams <[email protected]> > wrote: > >> On Thu, Apr 02, 2026 at 11:40:32AM -1000, Richard Barnes wrote: >> > That sounds like a problem for IEEE to fix, since the way IETF registers >> > parameters is in IANA registries, not documents. >> >> It might be a problem for the IETF to fix too because the need for a >> bibliographic way to refer to registrations has come up before and will >> come up again. We have DOIs for RFCs, and we could have DOIs for IANA >> _registries_, and that might be enough if we did. I don't think we >> could have DOIs for _registrations_, though I'd like to be wrong about >> that. >> >> Nico >> -- >> > _______________________________________________ > TLS mailing list -- [email protected] > To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] >
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