IETF mission (RE: pausable explanation for the Document Series)

[Keith Moore]

> One of the important states that is missing today is
> 
>    stable specification used for prototyping

agree, though you might qualify "stable" to mean
"during the prototyping period".  it can be extremely
useful to prototype subsets of a protocol even though
those subsets are not complete enough to ship.  and
what's the point of prototyping if not to allow for
the possibility of changing something?

(but since this is the problem statement working group, isn't
it enough to say for now that there's a mismatch between our
document maturity levels and both industry expectation and IETF
energies?)