Re: lynx-dev internal links

[David Woolley]

> some of it is - RFC's seem to have lost their original intent, which is
> a request for _comment_.  There's far too many that don't get comment
> and (like the IRS's "regulations") get treated as a "law".

RFCs originated in a research environment, where requesting for comment 
was reasonable.

Originally most people working with them were highly skilled and understood
the spirit behind them.

However, when commercial (and shareware) implementations started to
appear, their implementors were more implemented in claiming conformance
so implemented the minimum that was needed to meet their reading of the
letter of the RFCs.  As a result, all significant RFCs are now in formal
specification language with SHOULD/SHALL/MAY/MUSTN'T.  In many cases
these implementors don't fully understand what they are implementing.

Basically RFCs now have to be legalistic because implementors will only
follow the letter, not the spirit.

There are many other ways in which RFCs are becoming indistinguishable from
say ISO standards or ITU-T reccommendations.

Incidentally, I believe RFCs are still supposed to be backed up by reference
implementations.  Incidentally, HTML 4 is not specified by an RFC.