On Thu, Dec 01, 2005 at 03:44:35PM -0800, Hallam-Baker, Phillip wrote: > I don't think that the term 'authoritative' has much utility. The > version I want is the one most likely to be trustworthy. > > The early church had a series of battles deciding which text should be > considered cannonical. And pretty unpleasant ones at that. > > If you have the medieval view of knowledge resulting uniquely from > divine authority such disputes might make sense. That's competent rhetoric. It doesn't address the actual state of affairs, but it reads well and is inflammatory. Nice work. RFCs have authoritative versions for a couple reasons. Some are the result of the IETF consensus process and the exact wording on which consensus was achieved is important to know. There are a significant number of cases where small changes in the wording of an RFC or section thereof would not achieve consensus. To the extent that the internet community agrees to abide by that consensus, the authoritative version is what was agreed to. For these RFCs the authority due them stems from the consensus process. Now, the IETF consensus process is performed by humans, and therefore there will be mistakes. In principle, however, it is this process that conveys any authority on an RFC and not some imperative handed down from an oligarchy, tyrant, or supernatural power. I don't think your analogy to the(?) church is particularly illuminating for that reason. If you have issues with the IETF consensus process and the quality of standards (and other documents) that process produces, I'm all ears. -- Ted Faber http://www.isi.edu/~faber PGP: http://www.isi.edu/~faber/pubkeys.asc Unexpected attachment on this mail? See http://www.isi.edu/~faber/FAQ.html#SIG
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