--On Thursday, March 05, 2009 10:37 -0800 Paul Hoffman
<paul.hoffman@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> At 1:14 PM -0500 3/5/09, John C Klensin wrote:
>> I'd like to be sure that the people proposing this are all
>> actually proposing the same thing... versus the possibility
>> that they have different things in mind.
>
> Fully agree.
>
>> The proposed IAB document,
>> draft-iab-streams-headers-boilerplates,
>
> This thread, until your message, was about Internet Drafts;
> yours is about RFCs. The issues are quite different.
As you might remember if you followed my many comments on this
list about the IAB document, I think that separating the two
--creating formats that are significantly different-- is looking
for all sorts of trouble. IMO, one of our big breakthroughs of
the last few years has been the ability of authors and the RFC
Editor to work in xml2rfc format, doing clean diffs on the
relationship between an I-D and the final working ("AUTH48")
drafts of RFCs. I'm also concerned about the burdens on
tool-builders and tools, especially those less sophisticated
than xml2rfc, if we end up needing references from boilerplate
in the front of documents to sections or pages near the end (or
buried in the middle).
So, to me at least, "move status and copyright to the end" gets
a lot less attractive if that is "...end of I-D but not RFCs"
rather than both.
It also leads me to wonder about alternate solutions if the
problem to be solved is really "abstract on page 1".
For example, if we are talking about I-Ds, maybe the length of
the Status section needs serious review. In particular, I would
guess that
-- The second paragraph could be shortened significantly
or dropped; I don't know what it accomplishes.
-- While I'm one of the few remaining fans of the "valid
for only six months" rule, it has been diluted
sufficiently that perhaps we should be having a
discussion about whether that paragraph, or at least the
first half of the first sentence, is useful enough to
justify the space any more, especially with the
requirement for an expiration date on the document.
-- The two "The list of..." paragraphs have almost
certainly become noise. The shadow list is not complete
and still refers to FTP archives and 1id-abstracts.txt
no longer contains the information that the sentence
suggests it does. Apparently no one has complained to
the Secretariat or Tools Team about either, which is
probably a hint about how useful they are.
By my count, that would get rid of at least nine lines, or at
least eleven if we concluded that we don't need a "This
Internet-Draft will expire" statement in the Status if it
appears in page footers.
In addition, no matter what requirements exist about placement
of copyright notices, I can imagine no possible reason why the
order of Status and Abstract cannot simply be switched (in both
RFCs and I-Ds) other than whatever energy it takes to make the
decision. Since the Status section is 22 lines long in its most
common current form (and without the workaround text) and the
RFC Editor strongly discourages abstracts longer than about a
dozen lines, just making that switch (even without the Status
trimming I suggest above) would get the Abstracts onto the first
page, always.
So, just as I'd like to understand what people are advocating
moving, I'd like to see if we can separate an objective (e.g.,
"get the Abstract onto Page 1") from a mechanism (e.g., "move
the boilerplate to the end").
john
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