Internet DRAFT - draft-sheffer-ietf-rfc-annotations
draft-sheffer-ietf-rfc-annotations
Network Working Group Y. Sheffer
Internet-Draft Intuit
Intended status: Informational December 27, 2016
Expires: June 30, 2017
Requesting Comments: Enabling Readers to Annotate RFCs
draft-sheffer-ietf-rfc-annotations-01
Abstract
RFCs were initially intended as, literally, requests for comments.
Since then, they have turned into standards documents, with a
peculiar process to report errors and a highly onerous process to
actually have the RFC modified/republished. Non-IETF participants
are typically unaware of any way to provide feedback to published
RFCs, other than direct email to the listed authors. This is very
different from the way many web specifications are developed today
and arguably leads to the value of published RFCs diminishing over
time. This document proposes an experiment to remedy this situation
through the deployment of web annotations.
Status of This Memo
This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.
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This Internet-Draft will expire on June 30, 2017.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2016 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
document authors. All rights reserved.
This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
Provisions Relating to IETF Documents
(http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of
publication of this document. Please review these documents
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carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect
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described in the Simplified BSD License.
1. Introduction
IETF participants use the term "RFC" on a daily basis. We all know
that "RFC" stands for "Request for Comments". However the RFCs we
publish are anything but requests for comments. RFCs today are
static documents that do not invite comments. Acute readers who
insist on providing feedback will find the following text:
"Information about the current status of this document, any errata,
and how to provide feedback on it may be obtained at http://www.rfc-
editor.org/info/rfcXXXX." Once on this page, they will only find the
email address of a working group, which may long be defunct.
We can do better than that. This document proposes, as a process
experiment [RFC3933], to enable web annotations on published RFCs.
The target audience is non-IETF participants, essentially the IETF's
customers. We discuss the advantages of such a system and the risks
associated with it.
1.1. Conventions used in this document
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
"SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this
document are to be interpreted as described in [RFC2119].
2. Overview
We propose to enable, for an initial period of 1 year, annotations on
published RFCs. Document readers will be able to attach textual
comments to published RFCs, and these comments will be public,
visible to all other readers who will also be able to respond to
them.
Specifically, we recommend using the Hypothesis
(https://hypothes.is/) system on our "tools" RFCs,
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfcXXXX. We propose not to build any
custom infrastructure around this system but rather to use it as-is.
When the experiment is done, we will publish an experiment report
which will enable the IETF to decide whether this is of benefit for
the long term.
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3. Advantages
We foresee RFC annotations being used for a variety of purposes by
RFC consumers, including:
- Providing feedback on correctness and pointing out errors. This
is a much easier process than submitting errata, and as such would
likely yield a larger number of corrections.
- Pointing out and even discussing implementation issues (annotation
systems allow a user to "reply" to another user's comments).
- Linking to other standards and to implementations.
- Proposing ideas for and initiating discussion on "next generation"
standards.
Other advantages are indirect:
- Improving the appearance of RFCs, bringing them more in line with
people's expectations of web documents.
- Bringing in more people into the standards discussion, and
eventually into the IETF.
4. Potential Risks
The following section lists some of the issues and risks associated
with this proposal, along with a few concrete ways to mitigate some
of them.
4.1. Annotations can be improper and abusive
From a legal perspective, IETF deals with user-generated content
continuously (Internet drafts, mailing lists, wikis), so we know how
to solve the problem.
However there can be a reputation cost, and in extreme cases people
may be driven away from a document because of defacement. We might
need to apply some after-the-fact moderation to annotations,
similarly to what we have now on the IETF discussion list.
4.2. IPR issues around annotations
All public annotations made on Hypothesis are licensed under the
Creative Commons CC0 license, which puts them explicitly in the
public domain.
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See also the Hypothesis Terms of Service, https://hypothes.is/terms-
of-service/. Note that Hypothesis itself is a non-profit
organization.
4.3. Security and Privacy
Before they can annotate any pages, users need to register into
Hypothesis. Pseudonyms are explicitly allowed, but an email address
must be provided. Hypothesis does not currently support any
federated login such as OpenID.
The Hypothesis TOS declares that they do not track users of the
service. As far as the we have seen, they only deploy a Google
Analytics cookie.
Issue: can the GA cookie be disabled for particular URLs?
All traffic between the user's browser and Hypothesis is SSL-
protected.
4.4. Spam
So far spam has not been a problem with Hypothesis annotations,
because users need to demonstrate a valid email address. If it ever
becomes a problem, a process can be worked out where IETF volunteers
monitor new annotations for spam, and the Hypothesis team removes it
within a reasonable time.
4.5. Long-term retention of annotations
If at the end of the experiment we choose to migrate to a different
platform or to deploy a private copy of Hypothesis, we will be able
to use their documented API to retrieve any extant annotations and
store them into the new system.
4.6. What if we build it and nobody comes
This would constitute a failure of the experiment, but would not have
any other ill effects.
5. Proposed Technical Solution
Technically, to enable annotations we simply need to add one line to
each RFC published on the "tools" site:
"<script async defer src="https://hypothes.is/embed.js"></script> "
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A bit of additional code would be needed to display the IETF Note
Well text if we choose to inform users that they implicitly agree to
it.
RFC authors and WG participants can be alerted whenever their
documents are annotated using RSS and Atom feeds such as:
https://hypothes.is/stream.rss?uri=https://tools.ietf.org/html/
rfc1149.
The Hypothesis system is open source, which means that it can be
adopted to our needs during the experiment or later.
6. Trying it for Yourself
- Go to https://hypothes.is/, paste a link, e.g.
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1149 and press Annotate.
- Now open the sidebar to view existing public annotations.
- Highlight some text and right-click it. You will need to sign up
for an account to create your own annotations.
7. Normative References
[RFC2119] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119,
DOI 10.17487/RFC2119, March 1997,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2119>.
[RFC3933] Klensin, J. and S. Dawkins, "A Model for IETF Process
Experiments", BCP 93, RFC 3933, DOI 10.17487/RFC3933,
November 2004, <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc3933>.
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Appendix A. Document History
A.1. -01
- Minor changes after meeting with the Hypothesis team.
A.2. draft-sheffer-ietf-rfc-annotations-00
Initial version.
Author's Address
Yaron Sheffer
Intuit
EMail: yaronf.ietf@gmail.com
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