Subject: [Tools-discuss] Obsoleted by links on tools.ietf.org/html/rfc...

From: "Martin J. Dürst" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2014 17:34:56 +0900

Dear IETF tools experts,

Very recently, https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7158 was obsoleted after 
less than one day of existence by https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7159, 
because the publication date on the former was one year off.

The RFC Editor fortunately was careful enough to say that RFC 7159 not 
only obsoletes RFC 7158, but also RFC 4627. Unfortunately, the version 
of RFC 4627 at tools.ietf.org/html only has "Obsoleted by: 7158", which 
makes (attentive) readers click two links to get to RFC 7159. This may 
be the result of some kind of caching effect, or there may be some logic 
behind this, although in the case at hand, this logic would be suboptimal.

I hope this can be fixed. Ideally, RFC 4627 should only say
"Obsoleted by: 7159", because the obsoletion of RFC 4627 in RFC 7158 has 
been obsoleted by RFC 7159, and because that's the only information 
relevant to any readers except historians of RFC publication blunders.

Regards,    Martin.

---

From: Bjoern Hoehrmann <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2014 13:41:24 +0100

>behind this, although in the case at hand, this logic would be suboptimal.

I prefer breadcrumbs and being able to follow the paper trail. This case
is unfortunate, but I don't think accomodating it is necessary or good.
-- 
Björn Höhrmann · mailto:[email-masked] · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
Am Badedeich 7 · Telefon: +49(0)160/4415681 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de
25899 Dagebüll · PGP Pub. KeyID: 0xA4357E78 · http://www.websitedev.de/

---

From: "Martin J. Dürst" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 11 Mar 2014 11:31:37 +0900

On 2014/03/10 21:41, Bjoern Hoehrmann wrote:
> I prefer breadcrumbs and being able to follow the paper trail.

That should also be possible, but shouldn't our main goal be to let 
users find the current spec easily?

> This case

There are two aspects. The first aspect is that RFC 7159 explicitly says 
that it obsoletes RFC 4627, but the current tools html version of it 
doesn't mention this at all. Suppressing such information doesn't make 
sense to me, and as I wrote, I guess this is caused by a caching issue 
or a logical bug. I hope you agree with me that this should be fixed.

The second issue is whether to remove the information that RFC 4627 was 
obsoleted by RFC 7158 from the tools html version of RFC 4627. This is 
desirable from the viewpoint of trying to avoid confusion for the 
average visitor, but it may make it slightly more difficult to follow 
every minor turn of the "paper trail". It may also be a special case 
that may not justify investing additional time.

Regards,   Martin.

---

From: Henrik Levkowetz <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 11 Mar 2014 09:58:38 +0100

Hi Martin,

On 2014-03-11 03:31 "Martin J. Dürst" said the following:
> doesn't mention this at all.> Suppressing such information doesn't make 

It was fixed days ago.  Htmlizing the drafts is a sufficiently heavy-
weight process that the htmlized documents are cached on disk until they
either time out, a removal is triggered by a state change, or they are
refreshed manually.  In this case, the publication of 7158 triggered one
refresh, and another was coming for 7159.

> that may not justify investing additional time.

The data used for the Obsoleted by information ultimately comes from the
RFC-Editor, and if they say this, I think we'll keep it that way:

  4627 The application/json Media Type for JavaScript Object Notation
     (JSON). D. Crockford. July 2006. (Format: TXT=16319 bytes) (Obsoleted
     by RFC7158, RFC7159) (Status: INFORMATIONAL)

Regards,

	Henrik