Re: Requirements on IETF drafts: Pagination, forbidden words, etc.

>They say that IETF drafts must have 58 lines/page with form
>feed between pages. I fully agree that this is the format
>for published RFCs, but for IETF drafts it is very common
>to have no pagination at all. To paginate a document is
>quite a lot of extra trouble unless you have software which
>will do it automatically. I suggest that either IETF relax
>this requirement to be only valid for RFCs, not for IETF
>drafts, or recommend some software which will do the
>pagination for me, preferably as a Word macro.

Unless they changed the rule the other day, this is not a requirement.

>The document says "The Internet-Draft should neither state
>nor imply that it has any standards status." Does this mean
>that it is not permitted to write, in an IETF draft,
>sentences like "this standard only is valid for e-mail, not
>for Usenet News" or "to comply with this standard, an
>implementation must ..." or phrases like that? If the
>answer is yes, should I change all occurences of "standard"
>with the word "specification"?

That's probably what nailed you. "This standard" is inappropriate for a 
draft. "This document" or "this specification" is much better, since you 
don't know what status the draft will get (if any).

>Does this mean that it is not allowed to write for
>example "Category-to-be: Proposed Standard" or
>"This document is intended to become a Propised Standard
>if accepted by the IETF" or something like that?

Personally, I would say that those are also inappropriate. A draft is a draft.

>Network Working Group                                      Name
>Internet draft                                       Affilition
>file-name-00.txt                                        Country
>Expires August 1999                               February 1999
>
>to:
>
>INTERNET-DRAFT                                             Name
>Network Working Group                                Affilition
>file-name-00.txt                                        Country
>Expires August 1999                               February 1999

I also do not think they are sticky on this, but they may have changed the 
rules in the past two weeks.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium

Received on Tuesday, 23 February 1999 18:39:54 UTC