Subject: Re: [lemonade] I-D ACTION:draft-ietf-lemonade-compress-06.txt

From: Arnt Gulbrandsen <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 Jan 2007 15:36:48 +0100

I deleted some things so I wouldn't repeat myself.

Randall Gellens writes:
> At 10:58 AM +0100 1/11/07, Arnt Gulbrandsen wrote:
>> You should always be able to read and understand a sentence without 
>> looking up any references. If not that's a mistake on my part.
>
> I think the ease of understanding depends on the text, but is always 
> easier with a symbolic name for barRef instead of just an RFC number. 
> Perhaps it depends on one's style when reading documents.

And probably on the reader. Some people happily remember hundreds of RFC 
number, others don't.

In any case, you'll have to shout very loudly to make me change on this 
one. I feel sure that Lisa will volunteer me for something where I'll 
have to update references, and I detest the idea of looking for '[FOO] 
section 4' again, but I can stand the idea of updating '[RFCabcd] 
section 4' to '[RFCefgh] section 5'. Irrational perhaps, wrong perhaps, 
but I'm allowed to be irrational and wrong sometimes ;)

Normally I prefer optimising for the reader, but in this case I don't 
feel that named references are significantly better (assuming decent 
text), and therefore I think the ease of updating and the ease with 
which such errors can slip past reviewers are more important. (And if 
the text isn't decent, that's a far bigger problem than how references 
are named.)

Arnt

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