--On Friday, September 21, 2012 15:25 -0500 Ben Campbell <ben@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> It's certainly useful to some folks. Necessary? (*Shrug*) Not >> enough wasted bits for me to care one way or the other. >> > > As a Gen-ART reviewer, I called it out for exactly the reasons > Pete mentions, and care about the same amount :-) But putting > it there seems to hurt nothing, and maybe help just a little > bit in some cases. Ben, An observation as an individual rather than in any EAI capacity: The scholarly publication and information science fields have generally-accepted criteria for abstracts. The devil is in the details, of course, but, in general, structural comments or comments about relationships to earlier works are included only if they are essential to understanding what the current document is about. I note that this comment is consistent with Dave Crocker's earlier one, although I'd go a bit further. There is an additional issue, which is that the RFC Editor normally requires that citations of RFCs be treated as citations and referenced but, consistent with those generally-accepted practices, prohibits citations from abstracts. Ending up with "this obsoletes RFC NNNN" in an abstract sneaks by that combination of rules, but borders on the unprofessional. There are documents for which "this obsoletes that" really does belong in the abstract because it is essential for understanding the role of the document but in almost all cases, "that" won't be an RFC reference but a topical one. As an example in the RFC series that might mean that the abstract for RFC 5378 might more reasonably have said "This memo is effective XXXX and supercedes all policies about rights in contributions prior to that date". To the extent to which the issue is metadata information in announcements, let's fix the announcement templates, not introduce kludges to get around them. The argument that there is some other information that people might want to know that doesn't appear when the abstract alone is posted is, by contrast, completely bogus: people might want to know the date of publication, the author's names, etc., but no one has suggested that they be included in the abstract. On the other hand, I'm a strong advocate of requiring text in the document -- in the Introduction or a specially-identified section-- that describes the relationship of the current document to anything it updates, obsoletes, modifies, criticizes, or is otherwise directly related to. That is important explanation, not a few words in the abstract that partially identify a relationship without even hinting about what it is about substantively. FWIW, I believe this is ultimately an RFC Style issue and that the community should expect guidance on it from the RFC Editor. Finally, as I have previously pointed out to the IESG, the "requirement" for that sentence in the abstract made it into IDnits without anything resembling a consensus call or consultation of the RFC Editor. While I'd rather see the substantive issue addressed and have tried to do so above, we do have rules about community consensus before requirements are imposed and this hasn't made that test as a requirement. If the nits checker wanted to say "are you sure that the relationship between this document and any predecessors are not significant enough to justify inclusion in the abstract" I think that would be fine, especially if it also generated a question of "are you sure that the relationship between this document and any predecessors are significant enough to justify putting text in the abstract (and possibly cluttering it)" when the citation does appear. But, as a requirement, it is basically bogus absent either a style requirement from the RFC Editor or a consensus call. john