Status of standards
A. Lyman Chapin · ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review · 1994
The first report on the status of OSI (Open Systems Interconnection) and related standards appeared in CCR i n January, 1983 .Since then the original report has been joined, in alternate semi-annual issues, by a similar report on th e status of Internet standards, which in recent years have been recognized as "open system" standards at least as important as those promoted under the "OSI" banner .Since the Internet standards report was omitted from the Januar y 1994 CCR, both reports are included in this issue .It is widely known (and bemoaned) that the standards published by ISO (the International Organization for Standardization), IEC (the International Electrotechnical Commission), and ITU (the Internationa l Telecommunications Union) are available only as paper documents, for which the publishing organizations charge a fe e that is intended to help them to recover some of the costs of developing the standards .Internet standards, on the othe r hand, have always been freely available on-line to anyone with even limited (e .g .electronic mail only) access to an y part of the Internet .The accessibility of Internet standards has contributed greatly to the fact that they are today muc h more widely implemented and used in commercial products and production networks than the OSI standards .The process of "opening up" the ISO/IEC and ITU publication systems to make the OSI and related standards a s readily accessible as Internet standards has been going on for five years .Progress has been painfully slow, but th e recent unanimous decision of ISO/IEC JTC1 (Joint Technical Committee 1 of ISO and IEC, which oversees th e development of most of the relevant Information Technology standards) to approve the distribution of a list of ke y Network and Transport layer standards as Internet RFCs (Requests for Comment) may prove to be the long-awaited breakthrough .[Note : It is very important to recognize that publication of these documents as Internet RFCs will no t mean that they become "Internet standards"!Many documents are published as RFCs ; only a very small number of them are draft or final Internet standards .]During the next few months, these standards will be converted into a plain -ASCII text format that follows the guidelines for Internet RFCs, and will appear first in the SIGCOMM gophe r server on Internet host acm .org .When they are published as RFCs, they will appear in the usual RFC repositories as well .This process will take some time, as the standard format for the publication of ISO/IEC and ITU standards is no t directly convertible into ASCII text, requiring substantial effort on the part of volunteers .If you would like to be one o f those volunteers, please get in touch with me ; you will find contact information on the inside of the front cover o f CCR .An explanation of how to obtain RFCs via "anonymous ftp " or electronic mail may be obtained by sending a n electronic mail message to the Internet address rfc-info@isi .edu,placing in the body of the message the followin g single line of text : help : ways_to_get_rfc sThe following diagram, which shows the stages of progression of an ISO/IEC standard, may make the informatio n contained in the "Status" listing more accessible .With the formation of Joint Technical Committee 1 several years ag o as a collaboration between the Information Technology standardization activities of ISO and IEC, the designatio n "ISO " which preceeds the index number of standards in the "Status" listing changed formally to " ISO/IEC" .Wherever you see "ISO" in the status list, understand that the officially correct designation is in fact "ISO/IEC" .2nd, 3rd, etc .2nd, 3rd, etc .