I just find it fascinating and disturbing that at least two respected IETF participants think it's perfectly fine to leave stale references around, especially when it's trivially easy to fix them -- in the vast majority of cases taking but one sentence in the IANA Considerations. I'm simply flabbergasted. This isn't "useless hoops"; it's simple and sensible updates that rarely take any effort. Barry On Fri, Jun 3, 2016 at 8:13 PM, Stephen Farrell <stephen.farrell@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > On 04/06/16 00:35, Brian E Carpenter wrote: >> That's not realistic. If IANA refers to RFC822, and the programmer has a >> copy of RFC822 on her disk, that's what she will follow, because RFC text >> never changes and does not say "I am obsolete". > > I don't get how that applies. > > Do we think there's a programmer who will start from IANA and > not notice that there are references to 5322 and 2822? If > there is such a peculiarly myopic programmer, their code will > likely be crap anyway won't it? > > Or do we think there's a programmer who'll start from RFC822 > and not think "hey, this thing's 43 years old - I wonder did > anything happen in the meantime?" ;-) > > And anyway the current facts are that folks will much more > likely depend on stack overflow, not IANA, so the entire question > of the best reference is pretty much close to moot. > > IMO the only reason any of this matters is when there's a subtle > difference between the RFCyyyy and RFCxxxx versions of the same > registered thing and where there's significantly improved text in > RFCxxxx. In which case... we don't have a problem - RFCxxxx has > solved it for us by definition. > > All that's to say that there is no need to, and only a downside > to, forcing document authors to jump through more useless hoops. > > Cheers, > S. >