Re: Topic drift Re: An Internet Draft as reference material

[Keith Moore]

> Archival material is *extremely* important for future research.

no doubt.  but we have a conflict of interests here.

on one hand, historians and folks doing patent searches could
make good use of archived internet-drafts.

on the other hand, IETF needs the Internet-Draft series to be very
lightweight.  already there are too many folks who avoid issuing
I-Ds except when required to do so because they feel that the
publication process is too burdensome and too slow, and too many
people treat I-Ds as something akin to final form documents 
(as in, they need to be close to "right") rather than working drafts.  
having the drafts placed in a permanent and easily accessible 
archive increases that burden.

IMHO internet-drafts ought to be about as accessible as WG mailing 
list archives - which is to say, the stuff is out there if you want
to dig through it, but you have to dig.

Keith