On Sat, Jul 05, 2003 at 11:41:51AM +1000, Brian May wrote: > Couldn't you write a new document along the lines of "This is based on > RFC1341 with the following exceptions ...."?
Tell that to the authors of RFC2616 :-) Sometimes it's very valuable to NOT have people reading the old version first, for example because it's full of information that is almost but entirely not correct. Then you want them to instead read a consistent presentation of the new standard. Now, you might want to say that only the IETF should be allowed to produce something like RFC2616. That's fine as long as the IETF is the smart and effective body it is now and everyone is welcome to join it. But how do you know this will still be the case 20 years later? The arguments against forking standards are pretty similar to the arguments against forking gcc -- in both cases it's generally a bad idea, but the health of a free system depends on it being potentially possible. Richard Braakman
