[ih] Karl's post from Friday: Re: Interop as part of Internet History

[Dave Crocker]

On 9/14/2020 6:50 AM, Andrew G. Malis via Internet-history wrote:
> The IETF can override an independent submission RFC that duplicates or
> conflicts with IETF technical work (it can't be an end-around), but other
> than that, the ISE and RFC Editor are free to use their own judgement on
> what's suitable to publish.


I co-authored a draft that suggested alternative language to use, in 
place of words the IETF uses to indicate normative requirement. For 
example using 'ought' in place of 'should'.  This was to avoid relying 
on use of uppercase to indicate normative effect, though that was not 
formally defined as required at the time.  (It is now.)

The belief that using upper-/lower-case as a semantic distinction is one 
of the remarkable and continuing usability failures of computer science...

There was no current work and the draft sought Informational status.  It 
was meant as advice, not requirement.

The ISE even got external review (including some folk reading this now) 
who unanimously felt the draft conflicted with the IETF.  My best guess 
is that this was because we'd made the mistake of use some of those 
words in an apparently normative fashion.  But since there was no actual 
dialogue between authors and reviewers, I can't be sure.

My point is that The Independent Stream for RFC has actual editorial 
filtering. And editorial policy can vary quite a bit, depending on who 
the editor is.

d/

-- 
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net