I looked through that RFC 5XXX that describes AEAD. I somehow feel that there is nothing earth-shattering in it that would confuse cryptographers and crypto coders, if we sent it back to 1993.
Oh, wow, is this ever not true. If you want to blow your head off, go read the IPSEC working group's confrontation with Phil Rogaway over this issue; Rogaway went and canvassed other real cryptographers (notably Rivest) to try to talk sense into them, and failed.
