Re: Call for review of proposed IESG Statement on Examples

[Iljitsch van Beijnum <iljitsch at muada.com>]

On 18 sep 2008, at 19:07, The IESG wrote:

> The document SHOULD use values reserved for examples where such
> assignments exist (e.g. BCP 32, RFC 3330, RFC 4735, and RFC 5156)  
> and when
> the necessary semantic can be communicated clearly enough. If  
> unassigned
> codepoints are desired it is RECOMMENDED that those codepoints be  
> assigned
> or registered.  If assigned codepoints are desired, it is  
> RECOMMENDED that
> the authors get approval from the current codepoint holder.

First of all: note that this issue goes well beyond the traditional  
reach of the IESG. For instance, I've written books and taught  
training courses where obviously examples had to be used.

For domain names I used example.com et al, operating under the idea  
that anyone who registers such a domain can't complain that it's used  
in examples.

However, IP addresses are often a concern. IPv4 only has 192.0.2.0/24  
which is completely insufficient for decent examples. IPv6 has  
2001:db8::/32 which is big, but still not useful in all cases because  
it's often necessary to clearly show that two address ranges are  
different so they must be different prefixes. A common solution is to  
use RFC 1918 addresses for examples but I don't like it in general and  
it's not really workable in certain cases because these addresses  
carry a special meaning. (I.e., an RFC 1918 address in a 6to4 example  
would create the impression that this is a workable combination which  
isn't the case.)

So I suggest reserving three or so additional IPv4 and IPv6 global  
unicast prefixes for documentation purposes, that look sufficiently  
different from each other.

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