How standards actually get made

Easy to get wrong

• 1.3 Why anybody writes a standard down

  Only the capitalised spellings carry that meaning RFC 8174. A lower-case "must" in an RFC — the name of a published IETF document — is ordinary English and settles nothing. People quote sentences at each other for years without noticing which case they were written in.

• 2.1 Who writes them — two organisations, two habits

  Of every meeting recorded on this machine, 4,371 are 3GPP meetings, running from 1998-12-07 to 2028-06-13 ^[1]. That span runs forward because the calendar holds meetings that are merely scheduled as well as meetings that were held, so the last date in it is not "the most recent meeting". It does not reach back evenly either: CT's first recorded meeting is 2005, nowhere near the age of the group 3GPP CT.

• 3.3 One idea, from proposal to published text

  Being on that server is not the same as being published. The Organizational Partners that are standards bodies publish 3GPP's output as their own standards, under their own rules §5.1.

• 4.3 Looking it up yourself, and what the record will not tell you

  Not every RFC is a standard. Experimental, Informational, Historic and Best Current Practice are all categories in the same numbered series RFC 2026. "It is an RFC" says nothing about whether anybody agreed to it.