Hi Jari, I've seen I-Ds that are in very bad editorial shape, primarily produced by non-native English speakers. Such documents are hard to read and obviously hard to review in depth - people get distracted by the editorial issues. If such documents survive WGLC (maybe they shouldn't, but it's a possible outcome), it would be nice if at the discretion of the document shepherd they could get an early editorial review by the RFC Editor, so that IESG and directorate reviewers can do a better job reviewing the content. Thanks, Yaron > -----Original Message----- > From: wgchairs-bounces at ietf.org [mailto:wgchairs-bounces at ietf.org] On > Behalf Of Jari Arkko > Sent: Saturday, May 16, 2009 22:17 > To: Henk Uijterwaal > Cc: Working Group Chairs > Subject: Re: Out of the box proposal > > Henk, > > > If the RFC editor will find these errors, then I suggest to move their > > review to an earlier stage and/or instruct the IESG to focus on the > > content, not editorial issues. > > All end of the process reviews (IESG, LC, directorate, etc) already > focus on content. As several people read a document, some editorial > issues are bound to come up and they get reported. In fact, I think we > get plenty of them for each document. However, they are not blocking. > From an AD perspective they would result in a Comment, not a Discuss. > The authors are informed of the issues, but there is no requirement to > fix such problems. > > By the way, we had an experiment couple of years ago where RFC Editor > edits were performed before IETF LC. My personal sense of it was that it > wasn't all that useful for a couple of reasons. First of all, if we are > just talking about editorial issues, they could easily be done in the > RFC Editor stage, too. Secondly, we realized that a number of changes > were still being made at and after IETF LC, so any editorial cleanup > would in any case have to be done later for the changed parts. Finally, > the RFC Editor process speed increased significantly, so there was no > reason to attempt to parallelize the editing process and other > activities. The early copy editing effort might pay off if the editorial > problems were so severe that readers cannot understand the document. > However, I wonder if the document is truly ready to exit the WG at such > a stage. > > My advice: we already pay the RFC Editor for editorial work. Let them do > it. Authors may fix the editorial problems they have, particularly if > they are issuing a new version. However, I think we all would be better > off if reviews focused on content, and AD/author time was focused on > that as well. Is something important -- such as congestion control -- > missing? ABNF compiles? Behaviour rules are complete and consistent? Are > the health warnings about the implications of this specification in > place? And so on. I do see a lot of people typing up even editorial > review comments. It may or may not be useful; something like a spelling > mistake will be caught by the RFC Editor. And ADs should make absolutely > sure that they really are raising blocking issues only for truly > technical matters. > > Jari > > > Scanned by Check Point Total Security Gateway.
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