Handling Normative References to Standards-Track Documents
RFC 4897, “Handling Normative References to Standards-Track Documents”, is a Best Current Practice document published in June 2007 by J. Klensin, S. Hartman. It updates RFC 3967. The canonical text is published by the RFC Editor.
Abstract
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and Request for Comments (RFC) Editor have a long-standing rule that a document at a given maturity level cannot be published until all of the documents that it references as normative are at that maturity level or higher. This rule has sometimes resulted in very long publication delays for documents and some claims that it was a major obstruction to advancing documents in maturity level. The IETF agreed on a way to bypass this rule with RFC 3967. This document describes a simpler procedure for downward references to Standards-Track and Best Current Practice (BCP) documents, namely "note and move on". The procedure in RFC 3967 still applies for downward references to other classes of documents. In both cases, annotations should be added to such References. This document specifies an Internet Best Current Practices for the Internet Community, and requests discussion and suggestions for improvements.
What “Best Current Practice” means
Documents the IETF community's recommended operational or procedural practice rather than a protocol specification.
The canonical text of RFC 4897 is hosted at rfc-editor.org. Available in TXT,HTML.
- RFC 4896 Signaling Compression Corrections and Clarifications
- RFC 4898 TCP Extended Statistics MIB
- RFC 4895 Authenticated Chunks for the Stream Control Transmission Protocol
- RFC 4894 Use of Hash Algorithms in Internet Key Exchange and IPsec
- RFC 4893 BGP Support for Four-octet AS Number Space
- RFC 4901 Protocol Extensions for Header Compression over MPLS
- RFC 4892 Requirements for a Mechanism Identifying a Name Server Instance
- RFC 4902 Integrity, Privacy, and Security in Open Pluggable Edge Services for SMTP