--- On Mon, 1 Jun 2009, Julian Reschke wrote:
> People reading RFC 2731 should be made aware that what they are looking it is
> outdated; if they don't they'll produce output that doesn't conform to
> DC-HTML. I speak from experience, this is what happened to me.
Thanks for bringing this up. It seems clear that RFC 2731 is in need of
attention from DCMI so that it doesn't misdirect people.
> One way to reach this goal is to update RFC 2731, bringing it back in sync
> with the DCMI Recommendations. My understanding was that nobody was planning
> to do so; considering that RFC 2731 is almost ten years old, and the related
> DCMI Recs have been updated multiple times since.
Parallel maintenance was an issue when RFCs 2413, 5013, and 2731 were
published. Presumably it would again be an issue if these RFCs are
updated (which would mean re-issuing them with new RFC numbers that
obsolete previous RFCs), but I'm not aware of any recent discussion
of the subject.
Perhaps now is a good time to re-open the discussion.
-John
>
> So the alternative is to obsolete RFC 2731 with a document that points people
> to the more recent DCMI Recs; this is what several IESG members suggested to
> me, and what my Internet Draft is proposing.
>
> > I don't know how long you've been participating in the DCMI community,
> > but RFC 2731 [1] was originally intended to reach out to the larger IETF
> > community. At the moment, it also offers a rather briefer and simpler
> > introduction to HTML encoding than DC-HTML [2], which also ends with:
> >
> > "This document draws on the existing recommendations for
> > encoding Dublin Core metadata in HTML, including ..."
> >
> > Shouldn't this spec be the first place for DCMI to assert that other
> > specs are obsolete (assuming that's the case)?
>
> I think it is the case.
>
> I have no problem with DCMI Recs stating more clearly that they obsolete RFC
> 2731, but that doesn't help people reading RFC 2731, and relying on the RFC
> database [3] for status information.
>
> > In any case, another approach to reconciling [1] and [2] is to revise the
> > old RFC and re-issue it under a new number that obsoletes the old RFC.
> > This might work if [1] has sufficient pedagogical value and isn't too
> > difficult to update.
>
> That would work as well, but is significantly more work, and also requires
> both specs to stay in sync in the future.
>
> Could you clarify how this is better than just pointing people to a single
> place for looking up that information?
>
> > -John
> >
> > [1] http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2731
> > [2] http://dublincore.org/documents/dc-html/
>
> Best regards, Julian
>
> [3] <http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc.html>
>
>
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