Re: An Internet Draft as reference material

[Harald Alvestrand]

At 18:55 22/09/2000 -0400, RJ Atkinson wrote:
>Do such RFCs actually exist ?
>Do you have a specific example ?  I don't know of any.
>
>         I have always heard that the RFC Editor will not publish
>any document as an RFC if it tries to reference an Internet-Draft.

RFC 2095:

    [KEYED-MD5] Krawczyk, H., "HMAC-MD5: Keyed-MD5 for Message
        Authentication", Work in Progess.

This particular reference caused the issuing of RFC 2195, which has
the reference corrected:

    [KEYED-MD5] Krawczyk, Bellare, Canetti, "HMAC: Keyed-Hashing for
        Message Authentication", RFC 2104, February 1997.

It was a mistake by the IESG and the RFC Editor to let this one through;
(ok, I was there - it's my fault....)

OTOH, RFC 2887, "The Reliable Multicast Design Space for Bulk Data 
Transfer", is a survey of things that people are thinking about. The five 
references to "work in progress" in its reference list probably do not harm 
interoperability.

My RFC store shows that there are 292 RFCs with the words "work in 
progress" in them. I don't know if all of these are in the References section.


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Harald Tveit Alvestrand, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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