I am the assigned Gen-ART reviewer for this draft. The General Area Review Team (Gen-ART) reviews all IETF documents being processed by the IESG for the IETF Chair. Please wait for direction from your document shepherd or AD before posting a new version of the draft. For more information, please see the FAQ at . Document: draft-murchison-tzdist-tzif-15 Reviewer: Dale R. Worley Review Date: 2018-10-24 IETF LC End Date: 2018-10-09 IESG Telechat date: 2018-10-25 Summary: This draft is basically ready for publication, but has nits that should be fixed before publication. There are two remaining nits: The semantics of the various data items -- what they mean and how they are to be used in processing -- is only hinted at. I suspect that the draft is targeted at members of the community who already thoroughly understand the semantics of the data items (based on their names), but this is not stated. There is a reference: see "Sources for Time Zone and Daylight Saving Time Data" [tz-link] for more-detailed information about civil timekeeping data and practice but it does not positively assert that [tz-link] provides the specification of the data items in TZif. It's very likely that this is Not A Problem within the community that would use this specification, but that needs to be positively ascertained, as there is no definitive statement in the draft itself. 3.2. TZif Data Block time zone designations: A series of octets constituting an array of NUL-terminated (0x00) time zone designation strings. [...] The character encoding of time zone designation strings is not specified; however, see Section 4 of this document. I think this should be expanded to "The character encoding of time zone designation strings is not specified, other than that encoded characters MUST NOT contain a NUL (0x00) octet. However, see Section 4 of this document." This is because some important multi-octet encodings generate NUL octets, and while the TZif format does not fix the encoding, certain encodings (o rather certain encoded characters) MUST be forbidden.