Re: draft-freed-mime-p4-00.txt

On Wednesday 26 February 2003 16:41, Chris Lilley wrote:
> nxmmc> The IETF has this concept of recommending something in an RFC.
> nxmmc> I think that's close enough to an endorsement that I don't want
> nxmmc> to say the IETF never endorses anything.
>
> This is well put. Equally, W3C has a concept of recommending something
> and indeed our full standards track documents are called
> Recommendations to emphasise this.
>
> Perhaps Joseph is saying that an implied disclaimer of 'anything not
> in the IETF tree may be inadequate' does not add anything and is
> harmful, just as the W3C saying 'anything in the IETF tree is not a
> W3C Rec and might not be any good' would be harmful.

I don't disagree with this, but it was not quite my point. To me it seemed 
that the statement was not needed because nothing in the IANA registry need 
necessarily be seen as an endorsement. It's simpler for me to see the 
registry as a location for a non-colliding token with reference to a 
definition: a registration request or specification. If you want to know 
the endorsement associated with the definition, go read that. There you can 
see if it's a vendor registration request, an InfoRFC, Proposed Standard, 
Standard, Candidate REC, REC, obsoleted, deprecated, etc.