--On Monday, December 23, 2024 14:47 -0800 Erik Kline
<ek.ietf@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I asked Gemini for ideas and mostly got words that don't improve
> clarity (like "superseded"). One suggestion was amusing, though:
> "archaic".
Especially since we have at least three subcategories of might
plausibly be called "Historic". One we might call "obsoleted", but
"superceded" is really a superset of that. Another includes a
variety of non-protocol memo-type documents. For example, whatever
RFC 21 might be, it definitely is not "superceded" and "historic" is
probably about right. Now consider RFC 1688. It is informational
and has not been updated or obsoleted, but it is hard to imagine that
it would be applicable to today's network or technology. "Historic"?
Maybe. One would need to go through them one at a time, but I'd
assume a significant fraction of the FYI series would be in a similar
state -- FYI 3/ RFC 1175 might be an even better example. On the
other hand, for the portion of the world that still cares about X.500
or pieces of it, RFCs 1308 and 1309 might still be relevant (neither
"Historic" nor "Superceded". On the other hand, RFC 7 might actually
rate "archaic".
The point here is not to push back against "superceded" (or "archaic"
for that matter) -- I understand it was an experiment and found the
results interesting -- but to suggest that this demonstrates
something we should have learned long ago. If we try to repurpose
old terminology, even (or especially) terminology that has never been
precisely defined, we just make extra work for ourselves and/or
create a bigger mess.
john
