ietf
[Top] [All Lists]

Re: Topic drift Re: An Internet Draft as reference material

2000-09-25 17:40:03

I just love this mythology that "expires in 6 months"
means expunged from all retrievable record in 6 months.
Practically speaking it only ever means "if it hasn't been
picked up by a WG and revised in 6 months it is no longer
of interest to the IETF". Expunging it from the IETF's
official I-D site could never have hoped to be anything
more than a symbolic gesture, since there's no way to
stop anyone else archiving each I-D as it is released.

Somehow restricting a search engine so it returns some
sort of 'one time' URL pointer to an archived I-D seems
to rather miss the point. People will cite I-Ds because
they once existed - no-one is going to *not* cite an
archived I-D just because retrieval takes 20+ key strokes
instead of two. Even 20+ keystrokes sure beats moving one's
ass down to the library and pulling out a printed work
(I've observed that some cited works actually required
physical movement like the aforementioned library trip,
yet it didn't seem to stop the work being cited).

Just for laughs, I popped in my CD-ROM "Proceedings of
the 46th Internet Engineering Task Force". Opened the
I-D folder. Interesting. There's a stack of readable
(and therefore searchable) I-Ds in there, all telling me
they've expired. Perhaps the magic self-destruct codes
didn't work on my CD.

Oops.

Now, what was the question?

cheers,
gja