Updated draft draft-ietf-v6ops-natpt-to-exprmntl-03 published

[Elwyn Davies <elwynd@dial.pipex.com>]

Hi.

This draft has been taking part in a new experiment - the early copy 
editing experiment.

The experiment is being organzed by Bert Wijnen and information about 
what is going on can be found here:

 http://ops.ietf.org/ece/ and
 http://ops.ietf.org/ece/draft-bwijnen-early-copy-editing-experiment-00.txt

This document has actually been through WG Last Call already and should be headed for IETF Last Call and the IESG (Although the document is targeted for Informational it recommends reclassifying a standards track document to experimental and so is expected to go to IETF Last Call).

The object of the exercise is to get the document as close to its final form *before* it goes to the IESG so that there is minimal work for the RFC Editor (copy editing, etc) after approval. Then the AUTH48 exercise should just be a quick check rather than having to verify the RFC Editor copy edits and doing significant changes either as a consequence of the copy edits or because minor issues have been found after IETF Last Call.

In principal this should make the document more readable by the time it reaches last call (wg and IETF) and generally speed up the whole process by reducing the back end serialization of the publishing process.

As regards this document:
- the authors found three references that were unreferenced (left over from an earlier version and not noticed on subsequent edits) - xml2rfc now flags up the unreferenced items which will avoid this problem in future
- one reference (RFC3484) was unreferenced - the reference was added back in to s4.1.
- both of thse were fixed up in the intermediate version -02 which was given to the RFC editor as an xml2rfc source.
- the copy editor (Alice) did a very quick job: the majority of changes that were made were related to the author's addiction to 'which' whereas our style guide prefers 'that' for the sentence form used, plus the insertion of a fair number of commas.
- Alice picked up two things which she asked the authors to fix:
 - the phrase 'may be tempted to assume that the complex and 
   (development) time-consuming expedients' is confusing. The 
   authors decided that '(development) time consuming' was 
   gilding the lily and deleted the phrase leaving 'may be 
   tempted to assume that the complex expedients'.
 - the use of the combined acronym NA(P)T-PT:  Alice suggested 
   that this ought to be replaced with 'NAT-PT and NAPT-PT' 
   throughout.  On inspection the authors decided that there was 
   some overloading of the NAT-PT term: In most places it meant 
   'any sort of NAT-PT' (i.e., either NAT-PT or NAPT-PT) but in 
   a couple of places it meant basic NAT-PT (i.e., NOT NAPT-PT). 
   Hence we added the following note to para 2 of the intro:

      In the following discussion, where the term "NAT-PT" is used 
      unqualified, the discussion applies to both basic NAT-PT and NAPT-PT.
      "Basic NAT-PT" will be used if points apply to the basic address-only 
      translator.

   In the remainder of the document we have generally replaced 'NA(P)T-PT' 
   with 'basic NAT-PT and NAPT-PT'.  We inspected all the instances and 
   the surrounding text and some knock-on wording changes were required.

- Essentially we did one major and two minor edit cycles and the whole process was finished in three days.


Hopefully the document is now in really good shape and can progress through its remaining stages very quickly.

Please take a look at the result (version -03) which is now available on the I-D database.
If you have any general points I am sure Bert will be pleased to answer them.
If you have any comments on the process for this document or the current version of the document please contact me via the list.

Regards,
Elwyn