Subject: [Rfced-future] RSE (and RPC) Duties

From: Nevil Brownlee <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 29 May 2020 17:50:32 +1200

RFCs have an important property: when you read one, it is immediately
obvious that it is an RFC.  That identity is defined by the RFC Style
Guide. The RFC Style guide is at https://www.rfc-editor.org/styleguide/

Authors (via Stream Managers) submit Internet Drafts to the RFC Editor. One
of the RFC Editors will copy-edit each incoming Draft, so that the edited
version conforms to the RFC Style Guide.

>From time to time the Editors may find some text that doesn't quite fit
with the Style Guide, and may suggest changes to the Guide.  The RSE
attends weekly meetings with the Editors, suggestions for such changes are
discussed at those meetings; those that are agreed on are incorporated into
the Guide.

Therefore, one of the RSE's duties is to maintain the identity of the RFCs.

Another RSE duty is to handle suggestions for changes to the RFC Series.
Any IETF participant (we don't have 'members'!) can, of course, send such a
suggestion to the RSE.  However, right now we don't have a well-defined way
in which such change proposals can be discussed until either rough
consensus is reached, or the change is rejected.  Establishing a group in
which such discussions can be held is one of the goals of this (the
rfced-future) Program.

Cheers, Nevil

-----------------------------------
Nevil Brownlee, Taupo, NZ

---

From: Eric Rescorla <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 29 May 2020 05:50:06 -0700

> Guide. The RFC Style guide is at https://www.rfc-editor.org/styleguide/

Leaving aside the question of whether this is an important property....

1. Many documents look much like RFCs. In particular, I-Ds look almost
   identical, with the primary notable difference being the header
   (which is actually quite easy to miss). Ironically, the clearest
   indicator may be the header that tools puts on, which isn't
   part of the RFC). So to the extent to which the formatting is
   important, it's actually kind of confusing.

2. Much of style guide concerns itself with editorial rather than
   formatting issues, which I doubt have much if anything to do
   with it being recognizable as an RFC. To the contrary, you can
   take pretty much any text at all and format it with the RFC
   processing tools and people will get what it is (to the extent
   to which they get what any RFC is). I doubt very much that
   if (for instance, as Brian suggests) wholesale threw away CMS and
   moved to British spellings -- a fairly radical change in the
   editorial style -- that it would interfere with recognition,
   however annoying people might find it.

-Ekr