Maybe I'm not enough of a amateur lawyer, but has "authoritative" been a practical issue, i.e., has there been confusion or legal action because one rendition (say, PDF) differed in some trivial aspect from another (e.g., ASCII)?
Pragmatically, one could simply state that one form (say, good-ol ASCII, to avoid endless debates and for historical reasons) was authoritative and that others were "best effort" versions of the same text and that any deviations and omissions were accidental and should be brought to the attention of the appropriate authorities. I'm sure we can come up with more legal boiler plate to phrase this more precisely - we seem to be getting good at this boilerplate thing... With that caveat, in the case of a (presumably exceedingly rare) production error, the non-authoritative version could then be updated, in the same manner that the auto-generated pseudo-HTML versions we have today on the IETF site change occasionally as the rendering program is improved. This doesn't seem to have caused a significant protocol interoperability problem. Henning On Mar 18, 2010, at 12:42 PM, Bob Braden wrote: > > > John R. Levine wrote: > >> between the XML and the final output. If we could agree that the final XML >> was authoritative, > > John, > > What, precisely, do you mean here? Do you mean that there would be NO text > form of an RFC that was authoritative, or do you mean that BOTH the xml2rfc > form and some text-equivalent form (say, .txt or .pdf) would be > authoritative? I don't quite understand how either choice would work. > > I am asking about RFCs here, not Internet Drafts, BTW. > > Thanks, > > Bob Braden > > > _______________________________________________ > Ietf mailing list > [email protected] > https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf > _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list [email protected] https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
