On Sun, Mar 1, 2026, at 23:21, Simon Josefsson wrote:
> I never understood/agreed with the justification for the 'Recommended'
> column, 

I don't think this is hard to understand.  Though it might have been 
unsuccessful, the goal was to separate the endorsement of the IETF via RFC and 
the endorsement of the IETF of algorithms as being "good to use".

You can speculate on the reasoning, how this interacts with Independent 
Submissions (where you can get an RFC without any endorsement of the IETF), and 
I suspect that different people had different motivation in defining the 
recommended status, but the basic rationale seems clear.

Of course, what we're seeing in these various threads is that the separation 
hasn't really been successful.  ML-KEM is either perfectly good or insufficient 
without a hybrid companion.  The debate about endorsement via RFC publication 
remains, even if the codepoint allocation means that the RFC does not stand in 
the way of deployment.

That the endorsement of the IETF matters to so many continues to surprise me.  
Not a whole lot, but the way that symbolic measures like this act as a 
substitute for good judgment is one of the great mysteries.

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