> On 2 Dec 2024, at 08:15, Brian E Carpenter <brian.e.carpen...@gmail.com> > wrote: > > There's nothing new about Informational RFCs that are a (re)publication > of an external specification. That was covered in RFC 2026 section 4.2.2: > > Specifications that have been prepared outside of the Internet > community and are not incorporated into the Internet Standards > Process by any of the provisions of section 10 may be published as > Informational RFCs, with the permission of the owner and the > concurrence of the RFC Editor. > > It certainly was a bit ambiguous when you couldn't tell from the text of > the RFC whether it was that kind of Informational or the normal kind that > originated in the IETF. But that changed when the Independent RFC series > was formalized.
Except that we now have two very different meanings for 'informational' that we only distinguish in the boilerplate, making it hard to spot - 'IETF-wide consensus informational' and ’Independent, no consensus, informational'. That could be addressed by boilerplate but that is not written for people external to the IETF to understand clearly, suffering instead from the recurring issue that we write externally directed words with a focus on getting internal agreement to their correctness above all else. viz: > This document is not an Internet Standards Track specification; it is > published for informational purposes. > This is a contribution to the RFC Series, independently of any other RFC > stream. The RFC Editor has chosen to publish this document at its discretion > and makes no statement about its value for implementation or deployment. > Documents approved for publication by the RFC Editor are not candidates for > any level of Internet Standard; see Section 2 of RFC 7841. "This is a contribution to the RFC Series, independently of any other RFC stream." means very little to anyone not quite deeply engaged in the IETF. If we rewrote this boilerplate, aiming for far greater understanding by those who are not engaged in the IETF, then it would read something like: "This RFC is an informational document published independently of the IETF and was not edited, reviewed or approved by the IETF. It is not an Internet Standard, nor is it eligible to become one at a later date, and should not be referenced as such. Any views expressed in this RFC are solely those of the authors and not the IETF." Jay -- Jay Daley IETF Executive Director exec-direc...@ietf.org _______________________________________________ rfc-interest mailing list -- rfc-interest@rfc-editor.org To unsubscribe send an email to rfc-interest-le...@rfc-editor.org
