AD Review of I-Ds

Date: February 4, 2003

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.

Note: This document only talks about "finished" drafts. Guidelines for all internet-drafts are in Guidelines to Authors of Internet-Drafts, and are not repeated here.

1. Form nits:

1.1 Formatting

• See Section 3, "Instructions to RFC Authors" (draft-rfc-editor-rfc2223bis-07.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-07.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. Note that for the assignment of just an OID for a MIB or PIB Module, no IANA Considerations section is required; it is sufficient to request such via a MIB/SMI or PIB/SPPI comment line, aka: ::= { mib-2 xxx } -- xxx to be assigned by IANA

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

• URLs and e-mail addresses
  
  If your Internet-Draft specifies that a new URL, e-mail list, or e-mail alias be created @ietf.org, then please explain why it is needed. Creation of a new URL, e-mail list, or e-mail alias @ietf.org requires the approval of an IETF Area Director. When you request publication of your I-D as an RFC, the shepherding AD will review your explanation as part of the evaluation process. If the AD concurs that a new URL, e-mail list, or e-mail alias is needed, and if your document is approved for publication as an RFC, then the Secretariat will create the URL, e-mail list, or e-mail alias before the RFC is published.

2. Content issues

• Abstract
• Should be meaningful to someone not versed in the technology; most abbreviations must be expanded on first use
• no citations
• See: draft-rfc-editor-rfc2223bis-07.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 should compile cleanly using "smilint -m -s -l 9 -i namelength-32"
  An email service is available for the check. Extract the MIB module from the document and send it in the body of an email message (with a blank subject line) to smilint@ibr.cs.tu-bs.de. An error report will be sent back by return email. Also, a subject line with just the word "help" will return help info. In most cases there should be no errors or warnings present in the report. Please evaluate all diagnostic messages before assuming that they are OK. If in doubt, feel free to check on the mibs@ops.ietf.org mailing list or with the OPS ADs.
• All ABNF must be checked. Tool available from 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
• All references must be stable and resolvable.
• 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.
• 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.

4. Change Log

• February 4, 2003 - Added clarification on warnings from MIB
• February 4, 2003 - Changed text for IANA registration prior to RFC publication.