Re: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

[Stewart Bryant <[e-mail]>]

John Leslie wrote:
> Stewart Bryant <[e-mail]> wrote:
>   
>> That is an author centric view. It is far more important to take a 
>> reader centric view.
>>     
>
>    I must dissent.
>
>    Reader-centric views belong to publishing entities that generate
> income (whether by purchase, subscription, or advertising). There have
> always been book publishers that generate reader-centric interpretations
> of RFCs.
>
>    It's expensive to do so; and such publishing entities are careful to
> evaluate the potential market before producing one.
>
>    IETF publications produce _no_ income; so we need to minimize the
> expenses. That leaves us concentrating on the author-centric and
> editor-centric views.
>
>    I in no way dispute that other presentations can be "better" for the
> reader; I only remind folks that we subsidize IETF publications through
> our meeting fees, and other avenues are always available to publish
> reader-centric versions.
>
>    For one simple example, I know of nothing preventing citations of
> self-published "guides" as Informative References in RFCs.
>
>
>   
Ah. I thought we wrote RFCs so that others could read them and
translate the content into some locally meaningful combination
of hardware and software.

If that is not the case I wonder why we spend our time writing them?

My overarching point of course is the style of an RFC should be
so as to maximize the probability that the  implementation is
correct, and that the preference  for style should be driven by
that need.

Stewart