On Fri, Sep 15, 2017 at 6:12 PM, John C Klensin <john-ietf@xxxxxxx> wrote:
--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
I had thought of that but hadn't really wanted to shave the yack quite as much.
90% of the time, I find that my references are to the group of docs just like you say. If I am talking about DNS, which document I reference is fairly clear but sometimes there are five docs and it is a toss up.
Some of the vagaries are captured by 'updates' which produces 'updated by'. But what we don't get is 'related to'.