On 18-jun-2006, at 16:20, Hallam-Baker, Phillip wrote:
It's not _that_ bizarre. Suppose that we decide to allow
publishing RFCs in PDF only. Suppose that within the next few
years some company comes up with a replacement for PDF that
is better is some important regard so that everyone switches
to the new format.
And suppose some Vogons came along and demolished the planet to
make way for a hyperspace bypass.
There is a slight difference here: the earth hasn't seen any
successful demolishion attempts in the last 4.5 billion years, while
nearly any word processing document format from the 1990s can't be
read properly. In many cases the text itself can be retrieved but
there is almost always loss of some or even all formatting. I gather
that the current version of Word can't read documents made by all
previous versions of itself successfully.
The idea that any of the formats being discussed will become
impossible to read is silly. There are billions of HTML document
and hundreds of millions of PDFs
Of course it will not be impossible to read. But there is a big
difference between being able to have copies of all published RFCs on
local storage (another issue with PDF: the files are many orders of
magnitude larger) that are searchable with widely available tools
and having to enlist specialist help to extract the desired information.
I'm convinced that the success of the TCP/IP and web families of
standards has a great deal to do with the fact that the standards
documents involved are freely and easily available.
The output of the IETF is simply not that critical for this level
of concern to be warranted. RFCs are exactly that, requests for
comment.
Go ask the people at the company you work for how important they
think their GTLD servers are, and how critical RFCs 791, 768 and 1035
(to name a few old ones) are for their continued operation.
The real standards are and will always be set by running code.
This is so absurd that I don't even know what to say.
Without continued maintenance the value of standards is quickly
lost in any case. RFC 822 has long since ceased to be the Internet
email standard, it is of historic interest only. The same is close
to being the case for RFC 2822 as well.
That's nice. But I doubt you're going to be able to read that email
message exchanged through the latest version of the SMTP protocol
without some support for RFC 894 along the way.
The underlying fallacy here is that the documents are holy
scriptures, they are not, they are merely an engineering tool to
effect an engineering outcome.
Talk about what may happen in fifty or a hundred years time is
simply an ego trip. Its like those folk who in the dotcom boom took
out million dollar key man insurance. It had nothing to do with the
damage that might be done to the company if they died unexpectedly
it was a pure ego trip from start to finish.
It's the other way around. Time and time again, when an engineer
thought "well, by that time surely the system will be replaced" this
turned out to be a mistake. Is Y2K really that long ago that we don't
remember that lesson?
By the way: I happened to see a documentary on sky scrapers on the
BBC the other night. I was surprised to see that the Woolworth
building in New York (built in 1913) still has the original elevator
machinary in operation. It would suck to have to replace a bunch of
elevators because you don't have the documentation to prove that
they're still up to code...
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