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Chains of RFCs and Chains of Laws?
AlexNicoll writes "I recently completed a DNSSEC library for the .NET platform (thanks to Wouter @ NLNetLabs for his help!). While writing the library, I encountered the extremely entertaining concept of following the long chain of DNS-related RFCs on the IETF website. Some RFCs were obsoleted, some were updated, some updates were obsoleted by others, and some were never really formally related or linked — so even finding them was a challenge in search-fu. Finally, I think I got the whole picture, but I'm not sure. Then I got to thinking: searching for the relevant RFCs in IETF RFC chains was a lot like trying to figure out how (in the US) local, regional, state, and federal laws interact with themselves and each other. Since I just recently moved, I thought I ought to know the rules of the place I live in. It turns out to be just as non-trivial, if not more so, than parsing RFC chains. So here's the question: given that the processes are somewhat similar, does anyone know of a project that has tried to consolidate all the information in one place, so that it's in one comprehensive and up-to-date document, for either laws or RFCs?"
Update: 05/24 14:24 GMT by
KD :
Ray Bellis from Nominet took up the challenge and compiled dependency graphs for DNS-related RFCs.
Do what works.
Don't get caught.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I have actually been thinking about this.
Just like Computer Science got Design Patterns from architecture (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Alexander)
Lawmakes should take the concept of refactoring from computer science (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_refactoring)
When I worked at a public library in Virginia, we were told that we weren't allowed to show someone how to use the index of the federal and state codes without having a license to practice law in Virginia. I've heard similar tales of Texas. I am not a lawyer, so I can't possibly understand whether or not what I just typed related to actual law or whimsy.
Remember, the VAST majority of RFCs are NOT de jure standards. They can become so; at which point they become STDs (or BCPs for "protocols" as opposed to technologies). They average less than two a year; there's less than 70 of them (about twice that many for BCPs).
When they become true standards, they almost NEVER become obsoleted (except from disuse) or amended; I think that there are all of about 10 that have truly been obsoleted.
Now, I see what you're saying; following de facto standards is good too. But it involves work, and it has been traditionally seen as unimportant because most standards are only proposed with the expectation that they will slowly find their way down the standards path to become true standard.
I guess it's kind of like Physics; if you want to know what is all-but-universally accepted, you could do that in an hour. But if you want to catch up on the developments of the last century since the last round of formal standards were agreed upon by consensus (other than a couple of relatively recent stand-outs)? Well, you'll need years. You are implementing something that is the pinnacle of the field, after all; if you weren't expert enough to understand the chain of RFCs, you wouldn't be expert enough to implement those cutting-edge standards.
The difference with laws, though, is that we (or at least, the system) DO expect all but the most incapable of us to know, understand, and abide them - all of them, all of the time. I don't really think it compares. Joe Random doesn't need to know the intricacies of DNSSEC to check his facebook, after all.
Something tells me the Code of Hammurabi wasn't subject to a lot of revision. It was, literally, set in stone.
If such a thing were done, it would make the laws easy to understand and follow, and we can't have that, otherwise we'll bankrupt the lawyers!
As much as I hate the bitch, Ayn Rand was right about one thing--that governments make needless laws to create criminals of its citizens in hopes they'll pay them to not be criminals any more (well, paraphrased, anyway).
This thought process doesn't really work for computer standards, so I couldn't give a reason for the disorganization of the RFCs.
That said, one counter argument to the second paragraph of this is Hanlon's Razor--"Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence."--which would play to the disorganization all around.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
The US Code is kind of what you are asking for. Before the US Code, the way Federal law worked was that the Congress would pass bills. Once a year, the Government Printing Office prints a volume containing the laws for that year, in chronological order. These are called the Statutes at Large.
The law at any given time was the net result of applying all of the Statutes at Large up to that point, plus any bills that had been passed since the cutoff for the latest Statutes at Large and whose effective date had passed.
Bills are often written as essentially diffs to previous bills. Figuring out the law at a given time under this system could be a pain in the ass, of course.
To make it a lot easier to find and understand the law, the House or Representatives started producing the US Code. Essentially, this takes all the laws from the Statutes at Large, and arranges them by topic, rather than chronologically, applying all the diffs, resulting in an organized statement of the law. Note that a given bill from the Statutes at Large might end up going into the Code in several parts, because the bill might cover affect multiple topics.
The Code was not official. If there was a conflict between something in the code and a bill from the Statutes at Large, the latter won.
However, for some sections of the code, Congress has passed bills saying that those sections of the code ARE the offical statement of the law, superceding the Statutes at Large. This is called "enacting into positive law". An example of a section of the US Code that has been enacted into positive law is 17 USC, which covers copyrights. Thus, if you want to find the current copyright law, you could start with the version of the US Code that had 17 USC enacted into positive law. You'd still have to check the Statutes at Large, but only for bills that came after the enactment of 17 USC. On the other hand, 26 USC, the Internal Revenue Code, has not been enacted into positive law, so for the definitive statement of US tax law, you need to dig through the Statutes at Large for it all.
The above is what the government does. There are third party companies that provide more. West Publishing, for instance, publishes the "United States Code Annotated" (USCA). USCA reprints the US Code, but for each section it gives citations to the legislative history, and citations to court cases that concerned that section, along with short summaries of the relevant points of those cases. This is a great resource for legal research, but its not cheap. The complete set is $7663, although you can buy individul volumes. Copyright, for example, is covered in two volumes at $159 each.
I don't know if its still around or used much, but West also had a classification system of law, where they basically had a giant outline of all the topics that law might cover. They published annotated volumes that reprinted court cases, with each case preceeded with a summary written by West employees, which included references into that giant outline for all the topics that case covered, with short summaries of those particular points. They also published a big series of volumens that basically consisted of that giant outline, giving for each topic the case cites to the cases that involved that topic, and short summaries. If you were trying to resarch something, you could figure out where your topic appeared in West's outline, find it in those volumes, and quickly see the leading relevant cases and what they said. West is not authoritative, of course, so you'd then have to go read those cases.
Another company, The Frank Shepard Company, published a set of volumes that listed cases for each year, along with citations to all subsequent cases that cited those cases, with a summary of whether they were cited favorably or disfavorably. Once you found a case that you thought you might want to use (say, through West's resources), you could look