OK.. I'm obviously caffeine-deficient today. ;)
I see what you mean now, I had it 100% backwards. ;) And yes, there's a buglet in the wording, but I'm not sure how to fix it for what is probably a special case. I'm pretty sure that it's relatively rare for an updating RFC to do a wholesale clean replacement of one section in such a way that the new RFC updates the old but still stands on its own. Much more common are the cases like 3445 (updating 2535) or 3442 (updating 2132), where it *really* can't stand on its own.
Well, I was asking because we (the WebDAV working group) are just now discussing a similar issue. We've got a new spec (the BIND protocol) which updates parts of RFC2518 and RFC3253, and thus we'd like the RFC Index to have "forward references" from those to the new spec.
As far as I can tell, the text in 2223bis-07 is only inaccurate in the rare case where the base document is an aggregation of several registration-type definitions, as is the case for 1808 (or rfc2046 for MIME types), and the proper classification for the base *would* have been 'obsoletes' if the one section had been published on its own. So for instance, RFC2112 was able to obsolete 1872 (Multipart/Related), and was itself obsoleted by 2387 - but doing the same for multipart/mixed isn't feasible without either:
a) Doing a full rev of 2046 that 'obsoletes 2046'. b) Live with the fact that the 2223bis wording says that the new definition depends on 2046 when it really doesn't.
Are there really enough documents like 1808 or 2046 for it to matter?
I don't know. But as we have the very situation right now in the WebDAV working group, and the same things occured for RFC2396, I'd say yes. Basically it will always happen when a particular part of a spec is "factored out" into a separate spec (like specific URI scheme registrations in the old URL RFC, or the "binding" functionality in WebDAV).
And if so, do you have any good verbiage to recommend that will in fact make things cleared, rather than making it murkier due to special-casing?
Good question. Looking at the current text:
Updates
Specifies an earlier document whose contents are modified or
augmented by the new document. The new document cannot be
used alone, it can only be used in conjunction with the
earlier document.I'd say that just removing the second sentence should be fine. May just say...:
Updates
Specifies an earlier document whose content
augmented by the new document.Regards, Julian
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