Standards

[RJ Atkinson]

On Wednesday, Feb 19, 2003, at 11:07 America/Montreal, Brian E 
Carpenter wrote:
> We often hear it said that "The Internet runs on Proposed Standards."

I'd generalise it to say:
	...Proposed Standards and Internet-Drafts.

> Objectively, it's not 100% true (since IPv4 and TCP are Standards) but
> to what extent is it true?
>
> The reason this is interesting is that if, in practice, the Internet
> largely runs on PS's, then a legitimate problem statement might be

If I look at our enterprise customers, they rely on a fair number of
either I-D or PS RFCs in daily operations, though OSPFv2 and RIPv2 are
the most commonly used routing protocols and are each at FS.  With our
ISP customers, the proportion of I-Ds increases (especially at sites 
using
MPLS) and the number of RFCs (standards-track or otherwise) decreases.

My experience with OTP is that it was terribly difficult to move
from PS to DS and worse from DS to FS -- even though we'd documented
interoperability testing around the time of PS and the documentation
was online at www.ietf.org when time came to advance to DS and FS.
If that experience was in any way typical, I can't fault a WG for
not spending lots of energy advancing stuff beyond PS.

Sigh.

Ran
rja at extremenetworks.com