How does RFC 2854 obsolete RFC 1867?

Question

How (or why) does 2584 "obsolete" 1867?

This may simply come down to my not understanding how to read RFCs, but from what I can discern, 1867 describes how file uploading works with HTML forms and 2584 is about a MIME type not used in HTML forms. Two completely different things?

Answer 1

RFC 2584 marks the end of the Internet Engineering Task Force's involvement in the HTML specification. Further work was continued by the World Wide Web Consortium.

RFC 2584 reads:

The IETF HTML working group closed Sep 1996, and work on defining HTML moved to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

RFC 2584 obsoletes RFC 1867 and many other RFCs in the sense that HTML in its entirety was removed from the IETF's purview. This obsolesence of its previous HTML-related RFCs affirms that decision. And if you were to search for "HTML" on the IETF's RFC site, you'd see there's virtually no HTML-related activity since RFC 2584.

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Also note that RFC 1867 was an experimental RFC. According to the IETF's "The Tao of IETF":

Experimental RFCs are for specifications that may be interesting, but for which it is unclear if there will be much interest in implementing them, or whether they will work once deployed. That is, a specification might solve a problem, but if it is not clear that many people think that the problem is important, or think that they will bother fixing the problem with the specification, the specification might be labeled an Experimental RFC.