Internet-Drafts are the working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Unless revised, they are supposed to expire after six months. Most RFCs started life as Internet-Drafts, but many Internet-Drafts never make it to RFC status. Most (but not all) Internet-Drafts are produced within IETF working groups.
Pre-2000, when the IETF produced fewer documents, this page used to list all active DNS-related Internet-Drafts. Nowadays the majority of IETF documents are somehow related to DNS. Instead, this page now highlights the main areas of DNS activity in the IETF, and spotlights some important current Internet-Drafts.
This is the primary home of DNS protocol standards activity. The working group is conducted through the namedroppers mailing list.
14 active Internet-Drafts as of 24-Feb-2004.
This working group documents operational aspects of the DNS. The group is conducted through the dnsop mailing list.
6 active Internet-Drafts as of 27-Feb-2004.
This working group is mostly about DHCP and related protocols, which sometimes overlaps with DNS (for instance, RFC 3646). The group is conducted through the dhcwg mailing list.
3 active DNS-related Internet-Drafts as of 27-Feb-2004.
This working group is updating RFC 2916 for mapping E.164 phone numbers into the DNS.
1 active DNS-related Internet-Draft as of 06-Mar-2004.
These drafts were produced outside the formal IETF working groups. This may be because the document is too operationally focused to fit into a working group that is focused on developing standards, or because the author's views are different from the consensus view of the working group, or simply because the author did not proceed through the usual working group structure.
More drafts in this category are likely to fail to be published as RFCs than documents produced by the official working groups. However, many notable RFCs started life outside IETF working groups.