--On Friday, 15 September, 2017 10:53 -0400 Phillip Hallam-Baker <phill@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >... > Let us say we had used SMTP and SMTP-Message as the short > names for RFC-821 and RFC-822. We could then use > <norm="RFC-SMTP-Message"/> to refer to the latest version in > the document and this could automatically pull up RFC5322 > which is the latest version. This works as long as "the latest version" is a replacement for the older one on a substantive point by substantive point basis. Carrying your example a bit further, while 5322 is probably such a replacement for 822 and 2822 (or close to it), 5321 is _both_ a replacement for "RFC-SMTP" (821, 2821) and for what might be called "RFC-SMTP-Extensions" (1425, 1651, 1869). If one tries to handle that by naive use of short names -- something designed for a different purpose -- there is considerable risk of creating more problems than it would solve. If we think the problem is to create stable references to an abstraction of a document rather than to specific documents, we could assign STD numbers to Proposed Standards (not exactly the first time that has been suggested) or create summary statements of what documents are about and reference them (not the first time for that one either). But let's not pretend there are easy, magic bullets (via unsystematically-assigned short names or otherwise)...there just aren't. best, john