On Tue, 12 Apr 2005 18:21:20 +0200, Siegfried Schmitt said: > Hello Paul, > > so far as I can see in > > ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfcxx00.txt > > RFC 2369 is only a 'proposed standard' at this moment. > Maybe somebody should try to push this forward on the > standards track. Take a careful read through there. There's a *LOT* of stuff stuck at 'Proposed Standard' or even "Draft Standard': Proposed: MAIL Internet Message Format 2822 SMTP Simple Mail Transfer Protocol 2821 URLMAILTO The mailto URL scheme 2368 Draft: HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1 2616 DSN An Extensible Message Format for Delivery 3464 Status Notifications EMS-CODE Enhanced Mail System Status Codes 3463 MIME-RPT The Multipart/Report Content Type for the 3462 Reporting of Mail System Administrative Messages SMTP-DSN Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) Service 3461 Extension for Delivery Status Notifications (DSNs) MIME-CONF Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) 2049 Part Five: Conformance Criteria and Examples MIME-MSG MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) 2047 Part Three: Message Header Extensions for Non-ASCII Text MIME-MEDIA Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) 2046 Part Two: Media Types MIME Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) 2045 Part One: Format of Internet Message Bodies So it isn't like we don't do a lot of stuff with not-full standards.... (Actually, other than the SNMP/MIB geeks and the packet encapsulation/routing geeks, the IETF has moved very little to Full Standard in a *LONG* time: SMTP-SIZE SMTP Service Extension for Message Size Declaration 1870 10 POP3 Post Office Protocol - Version 3 1939 53 SMTP-Pipe SMTP Service Extension for Command Pipelining 2920 60 ONE-PASS A One-Time Password System 2289 61 UTF-8 UTF-8, a transformation format of ISO 10646 3629 63* RTP RTP: A Transport Protocol for Real-Time Applications3550 64* RTP-AV RTP Profile for Audio and Video Conferences 3551 65* with Minimal Control -------- Uniform Resource Identifier (URI): Generic Syntax 3986 66* That's literally *it* for Full Standard after RFC1400 or so, excluding the SNMP and encapsulation/routing RFCs. The reason for this is because 'Full Standard' in the IETF sense means "this has evolved as far as it ever will, and there's no likely improvements or resolutions of ambiguities in the next decade or so". HTTP isn't anywhere near ready for Full Standard - we've still got stuff like WebDAV popping up to extend it. Neither is SMTP - it's still a moving target with things like SPF in flux....