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It's called an I-D, for "Internet Draft." Very roughly, a Standards Track document in the IETF goes through four stages: 1. Someone submits an I-D as an indiv

by agwa 9y ago

It's called an I-D, for "Internet Draft." Very roughly, a Standards Track document in the IETF goes through four stages: 1. Someone submits an I-D as an individual. Literally anyone can do this and such a document carries no weight. 2. A working group (WG) "adopts" the I-D and proceeds to work on the document as a group. The document still carries no weight at this stage. 3. The I-D is published as an RFC. When this happens, the document finally has real weight. The document can no longer be changed, although it can be updated or obsoleted by another RFC. 4. When the RFC matures, it can be promoted to an Internet Standard. Let localhost be localhost is still in the first stage.

tialaramex 9y ago
To be fair this is the fourth draft of "Let localhost be localhost". Internet Drafts deliberately "expire" unless you write an updated version every so often proving it's still interesting and being worked on. @agwa says they have "no weight" but pragmatically what matters is always whether people do what the document says, not its supposed "weight" within a standards body. For example many of you will have used Let's Encrypt, the whole of Let's Encrypt is built upon a standard issuance and management protocol, ACME. But ACME is still only an Internet Draft, albeit it's likely to go to RFC before the end of this year. So it didn't matter that in your view it "has no weight", it had millions of people using it. If this I-D takes off and is widely accepted by, say, Microsoft and Apple, even if it never becomes an RFC it has a real effect. On the other hand, if it becomes a standards track RFC but Apple decides to ignore it and never promise that "localhost is localhost" in their operating systems then it's worthless despite the "Standard" tag.
- JdeBP 9y ago
  The one that I liked to point to was TSIG. ISC and Nominum got RFC 2845 through in a matter of months. Microsoft submitted its first Internet Draft of GSS TSIG in 1998, and it did not get through the RFC process for about 5 years, despite already being in real world use by Windows.

by agwa 9y ago

tialaramex 9y ago

To be fair this is the fourth draft of "Let localhost be localhost". Internet Drafts deliberately "expire" unless you write an updated version every so often proving it's still interesting and being worked on. @agwa says they have "no weight" but pragmatically what matters is always whether people do what the document says, not its supposed "weight" within a standards body. For example many of you will have used Let's Encrypt, the whole of Let's Encrypt is built upon a standard issuance and management protocol, ACME. But ACME is still only an Internet Draft, albeit it's likely to go to RFC before the end of this year. So it didn't matter that in your view it "has no weight", it had millions of people using it. If this I-D takes off and is widely accepted by, say, Microsoft and Apple, even if it never becomes an RFC it has a real effect. On the other hand, if it becomes a standards track RFC but Apple decides to ignore it and never promise that "localhost is localhost" in their operating systems then it's worthless despite the "Standard" tag.

JdeBP 9y ago
The one that I liked to point to was TSIG. ISC and Nominum got RFC 2845 through in a matter of months. Microsoft submitted its first Internet Draft of GSS TSIG in 1998, and it did not get through the RFC process for about 5 years, despite already being in real world use by Windows.