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This is only a tiny part of the trainwreck that is IETF and IETF-adjacent document nomenclature. IETF documents start as Internet-Drafts, which officially are just draft documents that can be changed at any time. As a practical matter, some I-Ds really have no status and some have been accepted by WGs to work on. You can tell which are which because (mostly) the latter are named draft-ietf-something. As WG documents progress, it's not uncommon to see very wide deployment based on an I-D (this was the situation for QUIC and TLS 1.3), whereas other drafts are just totally half-baked and nobody is deploying. There is no good way to know which is which without paying attention. Inside the IETF, RFCs can be published be any of Standards Track, BCP, Informational, or Experimental. Nominally, the first group are really standards (see asterisk below), whereas the BCPs are normative but not really standards (e.g., they might describe how the IETF is supposed to run), whereas the latter two are not standards. Except sometimes they are de facto standards, like RFC 6962, specifying Certificate Transparency (note that there is another RFC for CT, RFC 9162, which nominally supercedes RFC 6962, but is not widely implemented). There are two standards levels, Proposed Standard, and Standard (there used to be a middle one, Draft Standard), but as a practical matter lots of specifications stay at PS forever because the WG or authors can't be bothered to get them promoted to full standard. QUIC, TLS, and HTTP are all Proposed Standards. Moreover, there are other IETF-adjacent organizations that publish RFCs, such as the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) and the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF). These documents aren't standards at all. Finally, there is an Independent Submissions Editor (ISE), appointed by the IAB, who basically can publish whatever he/she wants on the Independent Stream. Note that this is different from an Individual Submission, which is a document processed by the IETF without going through a WG. |