I think your qualification of this draft is quite mild. I would rather say the author seems to misunderstand the functioning of pretty much every single protoc

I think your qualification of this draft is quite mild. I would rather say the author seems to misunderstand the functioning of pretty much every single protocol they mention in their draft, so I won’t be even starting to try to enumerate the shortcomings of the proposal, to me it has the same semantics as “let’s make ducks blue hats”. There’s only syntax. (If the author of the linked draft actually bothered to do any search they would have stumbled upon [-1], which is one of the “recent” activities). And indeed, as you said - everyone can submit an internet draft, it’s a question of writing some XML [0], and then running it through the program to convert it to the appropriate other formats [1] and uploading it to the repository [2]. From there on, however, the easy bit ends [3]: as part of the publication process before published as an RFC, the draft needs to be reviewed and approved by quite a few people with quite a few hundred years of collective experience in the field :). That’s why preparing the document within a workgroup is usually a better idea - it allows to get it into shape that will not be a waste of time for the people looking at it. During this work, there will be a few revisions of the document, also one would often acquire coauthors which will help working on the idea and make it better. So from my personal experience, it is between a month and several years between having an initial draft (which has been already reviewed offline and verbally thumbed up by a few people involved in the domain of expertise). Engineers participating in IETF also have sense of humour, hence traditionally there are 1st April RFCs that are ”special”. However, amongst them are still a lot of gems of wisdom, e.g. [4] The democratic nature of the development process makes it incredibly interesting environment to participate in, so I much recommend it. However, the first submission at the quality of the linked one will likely cause the opposite reaction from intended, so lurking on the mailing list and/or IETF meetings and maybe finding a mentor there could be a good start. -1. https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/109/materials/slides-109-intarea-tunneling-internet-protocols-inside-quic-00 https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/109/materials/slides-10... 0. https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7991 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7991 1. https://pypi.org/project/xml2rfc/ https://pypi.org/project/xml2rfc/ 2. https://datatracker.ietf.org/submit/tool-instructions/ https://datatracker.ietf.org/submit/tool-instructions/ 3. https://www.rfc-editor.org/pubprocess/ https://www.rfc-editor.org/pubprocess/ 4. https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1925 https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1925