Subject: [Pals] Barry Leiba's No Objection on draft-ietf-pals-ms-pw-protection-03: (with COMMENT)

From: "Barry Leiba" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Oct 2015 11:22:00 -0700

Barry Leiba has entered the following ballot position for
draft-ietf-pals-ms-pw-protection-03: No Objection

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COMMENT:
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Just total nit-level stuff here: unexpanded abbreviations that should be
expanded.  Note to responsible AD: "OAM" should certainly be flagged in
the RFC Editor's abbreviation list as not requiring expansion, and it's
not so flagged.

-- Introduction --
PE, MPLS-TP, L2TP

-- Section 2 --
CE, AC (in fig 1)

-- Appendix A --
SDH, OTN, G-ACh

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From: "Andrew G. Malis" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 20 Oct 2015 06:10:21 +0100

Barry,

Thanks for your comments, and that leads to a question. All of the
abbreviations that you cite are included in
https://www.rfc-editor.org/materials/abbrev.expansion.txt (well, it has two
expansions for AC, so there's a good case for expanding it here as well).
So when do you need to expand commonly used acronyms, and when not?  I'm
happy to add the expansions (I'll be doing a rev anyway as a result of some
other comments), but I'm curious if there's a general opinion in the IESG
on the topic.

Thanks,
Andy

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From: Barry Leiba <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 20 Oct 2015 04:05:32 -0400

> https://www.rfc-editor.org/materials/abbrev.expansion.txt

Right; that's where I checked whether they were approved as not
needing expansions.

> when do you need to expand commonly used acronyms, and when not?

As the above URL says:
"Some abbreviations are so well known that expansion is probably
unnecessary.  The RFC Editor exercises editorial judgment about whether
a particular use of one of the "well-known" abbreviations requires
expansion.  (For example, strict adherence to the expansion requirement
can lead to impossibly ugly titles.)  In the following list of
abbreviations, those that are usually (but not necessarily) treated as
"well known" are marked with asterisks.  However, since there are so
many different abbreviations and there is a range of knowledge among
RFC readers, we tend to expand abbreviations in case of doubt."

In my review, I only called out ones that do not have asterisks.
"MPLS", "LDP", and some others *do* have asterisks, and don't need to
be expanded.

Barry

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From: Donald Eastlake <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 20 Oct 2015 10:58:57 -0400

I endorse a policy of spelling out acronyms on the first occurrence in
the body text a document if there is any doubt as to whether or not
that should be done. Even if someone went to the faintly ridiculous
length of spelling out IETF and IP and TCP once, when they first
occurred in the body text of a document, what harm would it do?

It seems to me that, although the RFC Editor has a list which informs
their RFC editing, the effective rule is approximately that the
authors of a draft make an initial determination but they later have
to spell out the first occurrence of any acronym when asked to do so
by any of the WG Chair, Shepherd, Directorates, ADs, or other
reviewers. I think that works out fine.

Thanks,
Donald
=============================
 Donald E. Eastlake 3rd   +1-508-333-2270 (cell)
 155 Beaver Street, Milford, MA 01757 USA
 [email-masked]

On Tue, Oct 20, 2015 at 4:05 AM, Barry Leiba <[email-masked]> wrote:
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