Re: [rfc-i] rfc-interest Digest, Vol 196, Issue 22

> 
> I am having trouble completely picturing just what you have in
> mind, but, whatever you do, please keep in mind that references
> from RFCs are supposed to be completely stable.  That means
> that, if I, as author, reference draft-foo-bar-baz-03 at the
> time of RFC publication, wherever the link points should produce
> draft-foo-bar-baz-03 and not its most recent successor, whether
> that is draft-foo-bar-baz-15 or RFC 9999.  

Yes, but the landing page for -03 could have pointers to newer versions (I-D, RFC, Obsoleting RFC, …).

> This is, of course a
> cousin of whether a new I-D or RFC should be referencing the
> same target RFC as the document it is replacing or should be
> referencing the most recent update/replacement for that earlier
> version.  In both cases, heuristics will frequently be wrong.
> It might actually be useful for authors to be able to specify
> "the version we specified, really" versus "most recent version"
> in markup.

Which you already can do in the source for an I-D.  RFC references are frozen, though.

> I'm even a little hesitant about your pointing to the HTML
> version as long as at least some of the html versions are
> synthesized from the text rather than being supplied by authors
> (who have presumably checked them) or generated from xml2rfc v3
> (which is presumably infallible). The synthesis process doesn't
> make serious errors very often, but, in my experience, it does
> make them.

This could easily be fixed.
I did a PoC for that a while ago.
The data collection for the fixer does need some effort; this could be crowd-sourced or done proactively (probably more expensive than we care about this problem).

Grüße, Carsten

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