--On Wednesday, March 12, 2025 23:33 +0000 Paul Hoffman <paul.hoff...@icann.org> wrote:
> On Mar 12, 2025, at 14:19, Jay Daley <exec-direc...@ietf.org> wrote: >> >> Thanks all for the feedback. Where I think we are is: >> >> - people generally agree that we should indicate obsolescence and >> historic status on RFCs - for paginated formats (PDF and old Plain >> Text) this should be by the insertion of a page at the front of >> the document that states this, with no change to the rest of the >> document. - for unpaginated new Plain Text, no discussion about >> how to do it but presumably the same insertion but just a text >> block not a new page - for HTML/HTMLized this is already done (the >> legitimacy of which is a separate issue) but could be improved - >> no discussion about any changes to the RFCXML >> >> Does that capture it? > > There was not much discussion of specifics. The second bullet might > be adopted, but I see no reason not to regenerate the paginated > formats if the definitive format (the thing you still call "RFCXML" > in the last bullet) is updated. > > My preference for the above would instead be: > > a) People generally agree that we should indicate obsolescence and > historic status on RFCs > b) The metadata near the top of the > definitive format for an RFC can change if that RFC is made > obsolete or historic > c) All the publication formats will be > regenerated when (b) happens d) The indicator of the status change > will be at or near the top of the regenerated publication formats It became clear to me over a year ago that I'm well out in the rough on the "immutable" dimension as well as still believing that text and PDF are (and should be) more stable as publication formats even if most of the world is going to read one or other other HTML form most of the time. As a result and to avoid wasting the time of others, I've been avoiding this discussion. However I was about to respond to Jay's note earlier this evening and saying "if that is the path we are on, probably the best that can be done". I'd rather see paginated and unpaginated text treated the same, partially because of the relation to the PDF, but can live with a well-delineated text block at the top (I do not consider the metadata shown in the HTML to be well-delineated, but that is probably another issue). The above reformulation leaves me confused again. First, Jay's description of using separate pages for status metadata for text and PDF (at least), rather than risking messing up numbering or anything else, seemed critical to me and it seems to be missing from the above. Second, I took Jay's comment about RFCXML to indicate that none of these affected it, i.e., that adding that metadata was part of the generation process for the publication formats and not part of the RFCCML text. But Paul's (b) talks about the metadata at the top of the definitive format, which presumably involves changing the RFCXML (definitive) version of the documents. What am I missing? john p.s. I agree with Pete and others about "Historic". But I am concerned that "Historic" has been used often enough as a special case of "Obsolete" that giving the latter special status and position in document metadata without any mention of Historic (or, for that matter, "Unknown") status might actually be misleading and cause confusion. Probably no good solutions there but we should be clear that we are picking a less-bad option rather than an ideal one. -- rswg mailing list -- rswg@rfc-editor.org To unsubscribe send an email to rswg-le...@rfc-editor.org
