I'm currently working on the Auth-48 version of RFC 4346 (TLS 1.1),
which is a very light revision to TLS 1.0 (RFC 2246). During this
review, I noticed that RFC Ed had made a number of stylistic
edits to text that was in RFC 2246. For instance, all heads have
been changed from "text style" to "title style". E.g.,
From:
3. Goals of this document
To:
3. Goals of This Document
A bunch of copy-edit changes have also been made.
I don't want to start an argument here about the desirability of this
type of change in general (though think that's a discussion worth having
at some point) but I think it's worth discussing the relative importance
of different kinds of consistency, in particular:
* Stylistic consistency across documents published contemporaneously
* Stylistic consistency across time, especially for documents that
are clearly related.
In particular, it seems to me that there are some clear drawbacks to
making this kind of stylistic change in successive versions of the same
document, both in terms of effort consumed by editors and authors and
in terms of the effort required to figure out "what changed" by those
using automated difference tools. It's worth noting that although
capitalization differences are easy to suppress, there are other
stylistic changes that are less so.
What do people think about this?
-Ekr
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