Subject: [SPIRITS] IETF Guidelines for I-Ds

From: Alec Brusilovsky <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Dec 2002 10:07:28 -0600

Ladies and Gentlemen,

IESG and our ADs require all authors to submit new IDs for publication 
using the attached guidelines:
http://www.ietf.org/ID-nits.html

Kind regards,
Alec

AD Review of I-Ds

Date: November 2, 2002

All Internet Drafts which are offered for publication as RFCs must
conform
to the following requirements or they will be returned to the author(s)
for revision.

The WG Chairs are responsible for having this list checked before
submission
to the ADs.

The content issues have to be checked early in the development of
documents,
being technically integral. The WG Chairs are responsible for
this.

The ADs will check the list before submission to the IESG.

Responsibility for all checking is with the authors the case of an
individual
submission.

1. Form nits:

1.1 Formatting

See Section 3, "Instructions to RFC Authors"
(draft-rfc-editor-rfc2223bis-02.txt) for details and further rules.

Not beyond the 72nd column of a line

This is especially important for diagrams and code, which the RFC
Editor may not be able to trivially reformat to fall within the
margins.

Must be ragged right

No hyphenation for line-breaks

No footnotes

ASCII-only, no control characters (other than CR, NL & FF)

Do not number the "Status of Memo" or Abstract sections

Do not add a numbered reference in the ID boilerplate to RFC 2026
(makes it harder for the RFC editor to process
the document when they strip off the ID boilerplate)

Reasonably well formatted for readibility and clarity.

Use network byte order in diagrams (see
draft-rfc-editor-rfc2223bis-02.txt
section 3.4)

1.2 Required sections - all IDs

Internet Draft boilerplate

Must contain boilerplate that permits publication as an RFC
(see http://www.ietf.org/ietf/1id-guidelines.txt)

List of authors/editors

There should not be > 5 authors/editors (see http://www.rfc-editor.org/policy.html)

Abstract

Table of Contents

is required if > 15 pages

Introduction

Security Considerations

References

Must be split into normative and informative sections

(see http://www.rfc-editor.org/policy.html)

Author's Address

IPR notices

From RFC 2026 sec 10.4 (A) and 10.4(B) and possibly 10.4(D)

Copyright Notice

From RFC 2026 sec 10.4(C)

1.3 Sometimes-required sections

IANA considerations

Required if IANA has to create a new registry or modify rules for an
existing registry.

Required if the document requires IANA to assign or update values in an
IANA registry before RFC publication

See RFC 2434, and also RFC 2780 in some cases.

2. Content issues

Abstract

o Should be meaningful to someone not versed in the technology; most
abbreviations must be expanded on first use

o no citations

o See: draft-rfc-editor-rfc2223bis-02.txt section 4.5.

Security Considerations section

Must have meaningful exploration of security issues raised by proposal,
should include both risks and description of solutions or
workarounds

If MUST etc used, the terms must be defined (or RFC 2119
referenced)

Also read RFC 2119 to see what it says about using MUST etc

Specific IPR (e.g., patent claims & terms) must not be in an RFC
- any claims must go to the IPR web page and notice that there is some
IPR claim (RFC 2026 sec 10.4(D) must be included in the RFC

All user-visible text fields must be internationalizable

See RFC 2277. For most cases, this means UTF-8.

If text fields are included in some calculation, like matching, sorting
etc, it must be described in detail how those operations are
applied to the Unicode/ISO 10646 character set. see
"stringprep"
for more information on the recommended way of handling comparisons.

Use of formal languages should be in conformance with the IESG
statement on the use of formal languages - See
http://
www.ietf.org/IESG/STATEMENTS/pseudo-code-in-specs.txt

In particular:

All MIBs must compile cleanly using "smilint -l 9"

An email service is available for the check.

Extract the MIB form the document and send it in the body of an email to
[email-masked].

All ABNF must be checked. Tool available from href="http://www.apps.ietf.org"> www.apps.ietf.org

See
RFC 2234 for information about IETF ABNF. Include reference to RFC
2234.

Addresses used in examples should prefer use of fully qualified
domain names to literal IP addresses, and prefer use of example fqdn's
such as foo.example.com to real-world fqdn's

See RFC 2606 for example domain names that can be used

There is also a range of IP addresses set aside for this purpose.
These are 192.0.2.0/24 (see RFC 3330). Private addressess
that would be used in the real world should be avoided in examples.

References

o All references must be stable and resolvable.

o A bare HTTP URL is not generally considered a stable reference.

For Web-only documents, adding a reference number, title and/or an
author will help make the reference more stable.

Judgment can be used here; the stability of normative references is
more important than the stability of informative references.

o In case of references to I-Ds, use the format author
"title" (I-D file name).

Normative references to IDs will cause a standards-track or BCP
document to wait for the referenced RFCs to be published.

Non-normative references will have the I-D file name stripped out by
the RFC Editor and replaced with (work in progress).

3. Protocol Issues

Avoid IPv4 specificity. Both IPv4 and IPv6 must be supportable,
unless the protocol is naturally IPv4 specific or IPv6 specific.

No application can cause catastrophic congestion. See RFC 2914 for
details - applications using TCP or SCTP will normally fulfill this
automatically.

If any sort of end-to-end checksum or integrity check is being used
(especially, but not limited to, cryptographic checksums or
MACs), specify precisely the contents of the fields to be checksummed,
and exactly what order the operations are done in. Pay special attention
to any area reserved for the checksum itself.