Re: <a footnote="proposal">

On Oct 17,  5:14pm, Harald.T.Alvestrand@uninett.no wrote:

> Chris.Lilley@sophia.inria.fr said:
> > Since this is to be an experimental (forward looking) rather than
> > existing practice (backward looking) document, the fact that
> > something is not in HTML 3.2 is not a problem.
>
> Right you are - but since RFCs are permanent once published, I really
> *hate* references that end up pointing nowhere, like current references
> to HTML 3.0 do - and Cougar and the current HTML 3.2 draft are just
> that, drafts.

I agree. However, while permanent in the sense of continuing to exist,
RFCs can always be obsoleted by new RFCs as new understanding is gained.
References can be added, subtracted, or modified to point to more permanent
forms at that time.

And one hopes that one result of deploying an experimental RFC would be
new understanding.

I accept that references to drafts are undesirable, but sometimes that
is all there is until the draft stabilises and is published in more
permanant form. This can work, for example the current definition of
MIME registration is draft-ietf-822ext-mime-reg-04.txt


-- 
Chris Lilley, W3C                          [ http://www.w3.org/ ]
Graphics and Fonts Guy            The World Wide Web Consortium
http://www.w3.org/people/chris/              INRIA,  Projet W3C
chris@w3.org                       2004 Rt des Lucioles / BP 93
+33 93 65 79 87            06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France

Received on Thursday, 17 October 1996 12:33:43 UTC