ID-nits [was Re: suggestions (voting)]

[Harald Tveit Alvestrand]

--On mandag, november 25, 2002 13:39:34 +0100 Leif Johansson 
<leifj@it.su.se> wrote:

> Sam Hartman wrote:
>
> Why do we need the ID-nits document, or rather: why does it need
> to be so long? Obviously part of the problem is that people are
> unable to write correctly formatted text (hence the word nits). It
> would be interesting to know just how much time is spent by all
> involved doing clean-up usually left to software. I.e is this a
> real problem or not?

the growth of the id-nits thing came through a long series of exchanges of 
the form:

WG: "publish this"
IESG: "this can't be right"
WG: "why not?"
IESG: "because......"
WG: "oops.. I see"

When the number of occurences of the same "because..." became large, it was 
clearly not an efficient use of anyone's time to keep on doing it this way.

A number of RFCs (RFC Editor's guidelines, SHOULD/MUST/MAY, IANA 
considerations, congestion control....) were written to capture the 
"because..." statements. But some things are too small to need RFCs, and 
anyway the number of RFCs became large over time.

Now even the list of nits is large.

What does that tell us?

              Harald