To be fair this is the fourth draft of "Let localhost be localhost". Internet Drafts deliberately "expire" unless you write an updated version every so often proving it's still interesting and being worked on. @agwa says they have "no weight" but pragmatically what matters is always whether people do what the document says, not its supposed "weight" within a standards body.
For example many of you will have used Let's Encrypt, the whole of Let's Encrypt is built upon a standard issuance and management protocol, ACME. But ACME is still only an Internet Draft, albeit it's likely to go to RFC before the end of this year. So it didn't matter that in your view it "has no weight", it had millions of people using it.
If this I-D takes off and is widely accepted by, say, Microsoft and Apple, even if it never becomes an RFC it has a real effect. On the other hand, if it becomes a standards track RFC but Apple decides to ignore it and never promise that "localhost is localhost" in their operating systems then it's worthless despite the "Standard" tag.
The one that I liked to point to was TSIG. ISC and Nominum got RFC 2845 through in a matter of months. Microsoft submitted its first Internet Draft of GSS TSIG in 1998, and it did not get through the RFC process for about 5 years, despite already being in real world use by Windows.
For example many of you will have used Let's Encrypt, the whole of Let's Encrypt is built upon a standard issuance and management protocol, ACME. But ACME is still only an Internet Draft, albeit it's likely to go to RFC before the end of this year. So it didn't matter that in your view it "has no weight", it had millions of people using it.
If this I-D takes off and is widely accepted by, say, Microsoft and Apple, even if it never becomes an RFC it has a real effect. On the other hand, if it becomes a standards track RFC but Apple decides to ignore it and never promise that "localhost is localhost" in their operating systems then it's worthless despite the "Standard" tag.