[rfc-i] URL checking

[Paul Hoffman]

At 2:40 PM -0700 10/17/05, Joe Touch wrote:
>If so, why would it matter?

I wasn't talking about this specific draft, I was asking in general. 
That is, when the RFC Editor is doing things like making sure that 
the format of each reference is correct, do they also check whether 
the URL is even alive?

>  It's just as likely to break by the time it
>goes from the queue to final

In this particular case, it didn't break: there was a typo in the draft.

>(i.e., URLs aren't persistent anyway - why
>bother checking at all?)

Because it would be a service to the IETF community if a 
newly-published RFC that had URLs had ones that work, particularly 
for long-lived URLs like those to W3C standards, Unicode standards, 
and so on.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--VPN Consortium