Subject: IESG Statement on the Usage of Assignable Codepoints, Addresses and Names in Specification Examples

From: IESG Secretary <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 24 May 2010 10:58:26 -0700 (PDT)

Protocol specifications and other documents intended for RFC publication
often include useful examples with correctly formatted and syntactically
valid codepoints, addresses or names. Examples of codepoints, etc, are
such as email addresses, domain names, IP addresses or ports. Codepoint
values may already have been assigned or may become assigned in the
future to entities on the Internet.

The IETF has already reserved addresses, names and codepoints in a
number of spaces and domains: BCP 32 (RFC 2606 - Reserved Top Level DNS
Names) reserved some domain names for use in examples. RFC 5737 (IPv4
Address Blocks Reserved for Documentation) and RFC 5156 - Special-Use
IPv6
Addresses) assigned some IP address ranges specially for examples and
documentation. RFC4735 (Example Media Types for Use in Documentation)
registered one example media type and one subtype under each of the
registered media types for example use. Other similar specifications and
reserved codepoints exist.

The IETF should minimize any potential impact on the entity having been
assigned such a codepoint from unwanted traffic or other concerns. To
help ensure this the IESG will expect the author of any Internet Draft
that defines a new specification to use values assigned for examples
whenever possible. The IESG also recommends new protocol specifications
creating new codepoint, address or names spaces to consider if some part
of the space should be reserved for documentation and example usage.