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John Leslie wrote:
Stewart Bryant <stbryant at cisco.com> wrote:That is an author centric view. It is far more important to take a reader centric view.I must dissent. Reader-centric views belong to publishing entities that generate income (whether by purchase, subscription, or advertising). There have always been book publishers that generate reader-centric interpretations of RFCs. It's expensive to do so; and such publishing entities are careful to evaluate the potential market before producing one. IETF publications produce _no_ income; so we need to minimize the expenses. That leaves us concentrating on the author-centric and editor-centric views. I in no way dispute that other presentations can be "better" for the reader; I only remind folks that we subsidize IETF publications through our meeting fees, and other avenues are always available to publish reader-centric versions. For one simple example, I know of nothing preventing citations of self-published "guides" as Informative References in RFCs.
Ah. I thought we wrote RFCs so that others could read them and translate the content into some locally meaningful combination of hardware and software. If that is not the case I wonder why we spend our time writing them? My overarching point of course is the style of an RFC should be so as to maximize the probability that the implementation is correct, and that the preference for style should be driven by that need. Stewart
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