--On Monday, December 30, 2024 17:29 -0800 Rob Sayre <sayrer@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > John C Klensin <john-ietf@xxxxxxx> wrote: >> But, if we have to assign a label for some reason, "UNKNOWN" >> probably isn't automatically it because, like "HISTORIC" [...] > > FWIW, I like this one. I think we could say "UNKNOWN" and > "HISTORIC" are synonyms. But they are not because "HISTORIC" was intentionally assigned (although, as the IESG statement you quote more or less points out, the particular interpretation of that RFC 2026 text used varied among those documents. Assuming, for the list of documents identified as Historic between the first half of 1992 (RFC 1310 -- where the discussion and definitions in 2026 mostly come from -- and it implies that the term was in use much earlier but I don't have time to try to do the research) and now, that the term has the same meaning for each would be, well, silly. > My context goes back pretty far (maybe 20 years), but others have a > lot more context than that. Depending on how one counts, I'm pushing past 50 but, after a while, it stops making a difference. > I think the question here is whether "HISTORIC" means "MONUMENTAL". > No, it does not, in this case. We could say "CURIO", but that's not > quite right either. > > One could go for terms like "ANCIENT", "ARCHAIC", or "RELIC". All > of these denigrate the original text a little bit, so they don't > feel right to me. I think we should refine "HISTORIC". The current > definition is here: > > https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/statement-iesg-iesg-statement-on-d > esignating-rfcs-as-historic-20140720/ Actually, I'd describe that as specifying a mechanism for declaring documents Historic and a way to better document why that was done. The definition there is really not much better than that in RFCs 1310/ 1602/ 2026. It seems to me that there are two additional significant problems. (1) The document uses RFC 821 as an example but, as I read that part of the description, it say that document can never be Historic as long as SMTP is in use. At least once there is an Internet Standard replacement, that can't be write... certainly we don't want to encourage anyone to implement it and try to use it, it isn't current, and it isn't recommended to use. (2) That document says "A document is labelled Historic when what it describes is no longer considered current: no longer recommended for use." But we have a very large number of documents that meet that definition and, proportionately, almost none of them have been so labeled. So that statement is factually false and the document is, well, historic. > I think we should say that "Historic" RFCs may have been written in > contexts we no longer have. Not sure what that would mean either, other than to add yet another collection of documents that use the "Historic" term to mean different things. The traditional --and most effective-- way out of this problem if precision is needed is to define a complete new vocabulary with precise definitions rather than trying to adapt terms that different people will understand in different ways. Being lazy about this sort of thing, I suggest we might use "Historic1", "Historic2", "Historic3",..., create a glossary that defines each precisely, and then describe "Historic" as a generic category that subsumes all of those and maybe others and that is no longer newly applied to individual documents. john
