Maybe I'm not enough of a amateur lawyer, but has "authoritative" been a
practical issue, i.e., has there been confusion or legal action because one
rendition (say, PDF) differed in some trivial aspect from another (e.g., ASCII)?
Pragmatically, one could simply state that one form (say, good-ol ASCII, to
avoid endless debates and for historical reasons) was authoritative and that
others were "best effort" versions of the same text and that any deviations and
omissions were accidental and should be brought to the attention of the
appropriate authorities. I'm sure we can come up with more legal boiler plate
to phrase this more precisely - we seem to be getting good at this boilerplate
thing...
With that caveat, in the case of a (presumably exceedingly rare) production
error, the non-authoritative version could then be updated, in the same manner
that the auto-generated pseudo-HTML versions we have today on the IETF site
change occasionally as the rendering program is improved. This doesn't seem to
have caused a significant protocol interoperability problem.
Henning
On Mar 18, 2010, at 12:42 PM, Bob Braden wrote:
John R. Levine wrote:
between the XML and the final output. If we could agree that the final XML
was authoritative,
John,
What, precisely, do you mean here? Do you mean that there would be NO text
form of an RFC that was authoritative, or do you mean that BOTH the xml2rfc
form and some text-equivalent form (say, .txt or .pdf) would be
authoritative? I don't quite understand how either choice would work.
I am asking about RFCs here, not Internet Drafts, BTW.
Thanks,
Bob Braden
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