At 8:21 AM -0700 9/26/05, James M Snell wrote:
Over the past couple of weeks I've been working on a number of proposed Atom extensions that I am moving forward with as standards-track RFC's through individual submission.
Thank you for asking for these unofficial last calls. This is a very good way to work the process.
For the WG's benefit: The IETF is quite open to individually-submitted standards-track RFCs, particularly if they have been discussed in the open among those interested in the field. When James takes his Internet Drafts to the relevant IETF Area Director (that is, Scott Hollenbeck), James can point to the discussion threads on the mailing list, and Scott can use that to guage whether there has been enough discussion before taking the proposals to IETF-wide last call.
Note that there is always an IETF-wide last call on standards-track documents such as this. Those are initiated by the relevant Area Director. At their conclusion, the AD decides what to do, and normally then takes the drafts plus a summary of the discussion to the IESG.
One sad side-effect of this process is that, after the IESG approves the document to become a standards-track document, it will languish in the RFC Editor's queue for a very long time. Because the current RFC Editor has such a long backup, they normally tend to put WG-sponsored documents higher in the queue than individually-sponsored documents. Fortunately for us, we don't have to call the new standard by its RFC number, but instead by its extension name.
Having said all that, please review any extension documents carefully and post your responses to the mailing list. This helps both the author and the IETF decide whether to make them standards.
--Paul Hoffman, Director --Internet Mail Consortium
