On Sun, 28 Mar 2004, Donald Eastlake 3rd wrote:
There is clearly no way to do what you want with printed books, which
are what RFCs are modelled after. To get the effect you want, people
would need to go to a web resource or the like. But if they are willing
to do that, then they can almost as eaily find out about errata and
whether the RFC they are looking for has been obsoleted.
I also notice that you ignore all the problems of fluid specifications
that constantly change on line so that no two people/implementers can be
sure they are working from the same spec unless they agreed on a time
stamp, etc.
Without changing any of the publication process, RFC identification could
be changed to more clearly show the history and make it very clear what
the current RFC version was by using a -N suffix (where N is an
incremental version following the original). No external index would be
required to document that RFC xxx-2 supercedes RFC xxx-1. There is a small
loss of the obvious time series relationship one can now determine from
the simple number. A penalty I'd gladly pay to have obvious documentation
of relationships. In the case where an RFC (e.g. abc-3) was superceded by
another RFC (e.g., bcd), then RFC abc-4 could be published to be a small
placeholder reference to RFC bcd. Whether HTTP/1.1 superceded HTTP/1.0 or
was a new -number should be determined by the IESG on the recommendation
of the WG/AD.
Dave Morris