[ih] "The Internet runs on Proposed Standards"

[Brian E Carpenter]

On 07-Dec-22 12:30, Louis Mamakos wrote:
> And don't forget about the Informational RFCs that were published.
> 
> I was one of the perpetrators of PPP-over-Ethernet and it was only published as an Informational RFC.   This was at the dawn of the era of ADSL and there were a plethora of ADSL CPE and DSLAM solutions that had.. proprietary or at light opinionated and single vendor solutions.  I was at UUNET at the time, and we observed the one thing most all of the hardware could do was bridge Ethernet frames..
> 
> So we (UUNET, a service provider), a DSL equipment vendor and a client software vendor built and tested implementations that interoperated and documented the protocol in RFC 2516.   All involved were interested in interoperable implementations, products, and service provider customers.
> 
> It was thought to have been a short-term solution, like many things in Internet history, but still seems to be around here and there a few decades later.  For a variety of reasons, we never progressed it beyond "Informational" status, and it adequately served its purpose as a publicly available reference document that could be cited.

Not only that, it's classified by the RFC Editor as "Stream: [Legacy]" which means that its provenance is somewhat undefined. But indeed, a very large fraction of Internet users have depended entirely on PPPoE for many years.
  
> I'd imagine there are other "important" protocols in wide use that also went down this path.
Some of them were in due course adopted and further developed in the IETF; for example NFS and SSL --> TLS. An interesting case is RFC 20, listed as "Status: Unknown, Stream: [Legacy]" for many years, but promoted to Internet Standard (STD 80) in 2020. As a result, Vint certainly holds the record for the longest standards-track latency ever achieved.

For those who don't know, the IESG maintains a "downref registry" for non-standards track RFCs that can be cited as if they were standards: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/downref

    Brian

> 
> Louis Mamakos
> 
> 
> On Sun, Dec 4, 2022 at 2:55 PM Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org <mailto:internet-history at elists.isoc.org>> wrote:
> 
>     On 05-Dec-22 08:42, John Levine via Internet-history wrote:
>      > It appears that Jack Haverty via Internet-history <jack at 3kitty.org <mailto:jack at 3kitty.org>> said:
>      >> operating between my keyboard/screen and yours.  It could be all
>      >> Standards of some ilk, or it could all be Proprietary.   It might
>      >> conform to the spec, or have some zero-day flaw.  How do you tell?
>      >
>      > IETF standards are all about interoperation.  I don't have to care
>      > what's inside your black box so long as it talks to my black box
>      > using standard protocols.
>      >
>      > I realize this argument gets fuzzy around the edges, but for the stuff
>      > I do like e-mail, if the other end doesn't speak SMTP as described in
>      > RFCs over TCP and IP as described in RFCs, it's not going to get any
>      > mail delivered.
> 
>     Exactly. And whether those RFCs are Proposed Standard, Draft Standard
>     or Internet Standard turns out to be completely irrelevant. There's
>     a fairly large set of RFCs that need to be followed quite accurately;
>     the permissionless innovation that I mentioned can't duck that.
> 
>            Brian
> 
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