From: Iljitsch van Beijnum [mailto:iljitsch(_at_)muada(_dot_)com]
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.
Name one format that was intended for use as an archival document format that
is unreadable.
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 Web standards were always on the Web in HTML.
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.
Another bad example. The company standard for internal documents is Microsoft
Word and Powerpoint.
I was under the impression that the divergence between the DNS standards and
reality was sufficiently great that any documentation has to be the starting
point for regression testing and QA rather than gospel. Certainly this is the
case in the PKI world.
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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