Re: Internet Draft

Larry Masinter (masinter@parc.xerox.com)
Fri, 11 Nov 94 20:00:14 EST

Perhaps there's some confusion about the role of Internet Drafts. The
boilerplate that comes with them says rather explicitly that it is
inappropriate to make references to them except as "work in progress".
I take from this a couple of conclusions:

* revisions of the HTML 2.0 document should be made Internet Drafts
whenever they are being sent out for review. Updating the draft
frequently isn't bad.

It sounds like it's too late for this version to be made an internet
draft, but as soon as there is a new version that's stable enough
that you want people to review it, submit it.

* It is inappropriate for a proposed standard to reference an
internet draft. I submitted 'file upload' as an Internet Draft so
that people could comment on a well-known version, but expect
that document to expire.

I'm not nearly as concerned about which 'level' of HTML the file
upload proposel gets into as long as some version of it is agreed to
and gets into some level that is widely implemented, soon. I think
it fits more closely with the intent of 2.0 than of 3.0. Perhaps that
means it goes into 2.1, or version 3 of level 2, or however it's
decided that levels and versions will play out. For now, I'd rather
concentrate on the content, though, and leave the "level" game to be
worked out after we see how hard this thing is to implement, how
widely it is adopted, etc.