I wish government legislature did this with their bills. Reading a piece of legislation is maddening because it's always just a description of diffs, without seeing the final outcome.

I never really realized that this symptom was common with RFCs as well.

Is there something about how governing bodies work that lead to this style of output? Why aren't we using a bit more modern techniques now, more akin to how word processors let you see the diffs inline but also the final format? Or git-style PRs that show the deltas but you can always just view "main"?

> Why aren't we using a bit more modern techniques now, ...

because those in power don't care, this problem doesn't really affect them, they don't know about potential solutions (too old and/or not programmers), they are afraid of structural change anyhow, etc, etc.

Your response seems to have a political bent to it, though I could be presuming too much. Assuming you intended for it that way: how does that explain RFCs seemingly behaving the same way? That's about as techie as you can get!

https://www.ietf.org/rfcdiff?url1=draft-ietf-tcpm-rfc793bis-...

sure, maybe IETF uses their homegrown version, but - for example - TC39 uses GitHub https://github.com/tc39/ (here are the proposals for JS https://github.com/tc39/proposals ), whatWG also uses GH https://github.com/whatwg/html