Re: An Internet Draft as reference material

On Wed, 20 Sep 2000 15:34:50 -0000, Bob Braden said:
> The intent is that when good & useful information and ideas are
> published in Internet Drafts, they should become Informational RFCs if
> they merit preservation and referencing.
I think the issue that most people are having with this is that quite
often, for whatever reason, we are losing insight as to why things were
done the way they were.  Yes, we see what finally ended up in RFC1341
for MIME, and the updates thereof.  However, that document was *nothing*
like what the early drafts contained, and some things that were the cause
of vehement debate in the working group and finally decided on One Final Way
to do things are mostly hand-waved over in the final RFC (for instance, the
ban on certain Content-Transfer-Encodings on multipart/ and message/ bodytypes
is in RFC1341 just listed as "Can add considerable complexity", but the
effect it has on message/partial (which was a major motivating cause for the
message wars in the working group) isn't actually referenced in the RFC.

RFC1521, section 7.3.2, *did* contain a long paragraph explaining the
problem.  

However, the vast majority of RFC's come out and are NOT lucky enough to
get another revision like that.

Although, actually, what would *really* benefit the historians would be
searchable archives of the working group mailing lists, but that's a
different issue.... ;)

-- 
                                Valdis Kletnieks
                                Operating Systems Analyst
                                Virginia Tech

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