[Rswg] Presentation consistency (Re: Making the RFC 9280 text more specific

[Jean Mahoney <[e-mail]>]

Hi all,

On 3/5/24 11:15 AM, Paul Hoffman wrote:
> Greetings again. Eliot has proposed the following to make the references to RFC 9280 more specific:
>     https://github.com/paulehoffman/draft-rswg-rfc7990-updates/pull/25/files

[JM] The text regarding consistent presentation gives me pause, 
specifically the use of the phrase "across the Series":

    RFCs are copyedited, formatted, published, and may be reissued to
    maintain a consistent presentation across the Series.

The phrase also exists in -05:

    Similarly, as production tools change, publication
    versions can be regenerated to ensure a consistent presentation
    across the series.

Reissuing RFCs that are in RFCXML v3 is one thing (which still requires 
careful consideration and testing), maintaining presentation consistency 
across the entire Series _across time_ is another. Right now, the Series 
is mostly consistently presented due to the text publication format.

The addition of the property "The series as a whole is consistently 
presented" could become an impediment to changing publication formats in 
the future. For instance, there have been discussions of dropping the 
text publication format because it lacks the features of HTML and PDF. 
If presentation consistency across the entire Series is a property we 
want, and the text format is the only thing that can provide that 
property because it would be a huge undertaking to convert the pre-v3 
RFCs to RFCXML format so that they could be kept consistent with newer 
RFCs (and not all could be converted, for example, see RFC 8 [1]), then 
the text format would have to remain.

Best regards,
Jean

[1] https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8

> 
> Please discuss this topic here.
> 
> --Paul Hoffman
>