Subject: Re: [Gen-art] Gen-ART review of draft-reschke-rfc2731bis-02

From: Julian Reschke <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 04 Oct 2009 20:28:05 +0200

Hi Spencer,

thanks for the feedback; comments inline.

Spencer Dawkins wrote:
> ...
> I have three comments on this short draft...
> 
> I wish the IETF community had a clearer understanding of the 
> relationship between Historic and Obsolete than we have, but that's a 
> comment for IESG action, not a comment that can be reasonably made in 
> response to Last Call for this document. Having said that, I THINK this 
> document should be doing both (setting RFC 2731 to Historic AND Obsolete 
> in the RFC Editor database). The title says one, and the text says the 
> other - both should mention both actions, because neither is a superset 
> of the other.
> ...

1) Yes, the title just says "obsolete". If we keep the recommendation to 
reclassify it to historic then the title should reflect that.

2) I think the "obsoletes" part is necessary, so that the RFC Index 
actually points people to the document that tells them to go the DC-HTML 
spec instead.

3) I'm not completely convinced about "historic" anymore; after all, the 
spec *is* in use, it's just not developed inside the IETF anymore. Not 
sure what the right state in the RFC Index would be, and also not sure 
how to find out. Alexey; is this something the IESG can give advice on?

The bottom line: I'll update the document to whatever we can get 
consensus on. From my point of view the main point is that people 
looking at RFC 2731 at least have a chance to find the now current specs.

> I agree with David Harrington's Last Call comment that including the 
> name of the RFC being declared Obsolete/Historic in the title of this 
> draft would be appropriate. I don't expect most members of the IETF 
> community would remember what RFC 2731 was about (sure, you can actually 
> open the document, but most of us probably wouldn't need to do that).

I will do that.

BTW: when David said "name" I read "number", thus I was confused, 
because the RFC number is there. So he wanted the *title* :-)

> Julian pointed out in Last Call discussion that the Dublin Initiative 
> has been maintaining this specification for nearly 10 years. It would 
> probably be helpful if the document provided this timestamp - perhaps 
> something like
> 
>   [RFC2731] defines "Encoding Dublin Core Metadata in HTML".  Newer
>   specifications published by the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative [1]
>   (DCMI) over the past decade, in particular "Expressing Dublin Core 
> metadata using HTML/
>          ^^^^ ^^^ ^^^^ ^^^^^^
>   XHTML meta and link elements" (DC-HTML,
>   <http://dublincore.org/documents/dc-html/>), have obsoleted this
>   work.
> ...

Sounds good.

I have made the aforementioned changes, plus the ones we agreed upon on 
ietf-discuss, in 
<http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/draft-reschke-rfc2731bis-latest.html>, 
from which I can generate a new draft quickly (probably after LC ends?).

It seems the main remaining issue is the Obsolete/Historic/Both issue, 
on which I'd like to see IESG feedback...

BR, Julian