Re: ISSN for RFC Series under Consideration
John C Klensin <john-ietf@jck.com> Thu, 22 May 2008 08:44 UTC
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Date: Thu, 22 May 2008 04:21:27 -0400
From: John C Klensin <john-ietf@jck.com>
To: Brian E Carpenter <brian.e.carpenter@gmail.com>, Eric Rescorla <ekr@networkresonance.com>
Subject: Re: ISSN for RFC Series under Consideration
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Cc: Working Group Chairs <wgchairs@ietf.org>, IAB <iab@ietf.org>, IETF Discussion <ietf@ietf.org>, Melinda Shore <mshore@cisco.com>, IAOC <iaoc@ietf.org>, Julian Reschke <julian.reschke@gmx.de>, RFC Editor <rfc-editor@rfc-editor.org>
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--On Thursday, 22 May, 2008 13:06 +1200 Brian E Carpenter <brian.e.carpenter@gmail.com> wrote: >> I agree with Melinda here. I can't remember ever seeing >> anything like an ISBN or an ISSN used as a citation in an >> academic paper. > > Correct, but I have seen a wide variety of ways to cite RFCs > and tying them all back to an ISSN number would be a step > forward IMHO. In any case: at worst, harmless. I think that is the point, along with the comments about ordering and cataloging. There is also the small matter of this identifier being guaranteed to be unique. Fortunately, there is no such guarantee for "RFC nnnn". I think we should be a lot more flexible about doing something that has been (I gather) requested by some other groups, that will make it easier to persuade some libraries, etc., to keep things on file, that will guarantee some small marginal uniqueness... and that doesn't cost us anything other than one registration and having the RFC Editor attach one more partial line of boilerplate at the time of RFC publication (an ISSN should not, indeed must not, appear on I-Ds -- they are not part of the RFC Series). This is not a matter of eating our own dogfood (or not). We have been unsuccessful in persuading much of the rest of the world --especially the library/archival community to eat and enjoy our dogfood. IMO, it is time we grow up sufficiently to try to accommodate their perceived needs, especially if it doesn't require any fundamental changes to what we are doing and the costs to us are minimal. Two additional observations: (1) While we think of RFCs as online documents, their antecedents, and all of the early ones, were paper publications. Our standard formats are laid out for paper and not, e.g., with more or less dynamic style sheets. For better or worse, the library/archival community tends to equate "paper" with "stable in format and content" and "online" with "extremely volatile and potentially ever-changing. That set of relationships may be broken, but it is what it is and not under our control. I think it will evolve to a distinction between "in page format and fixed" and "live documents" (the first of which would fit RFCs perfectly), but it won't be this month or even this year. I suggest that the community would be better served, and the ISSN made more useful, if we treated RFCs as "authoritative paper, copies available online" rather than "online documents". If that requires the RFC Editor or IASA to print out all of the RFCs published in a given month, throw them into an envelope, and put the envelope into the smail, I imagine we can afford that. (2) Ed's comments about ISBNs are substantially correct. We could go that route, but the marginal cost tradeoffs are much worse. In particular: (i) Not only do they cost money, but they impose a considerable record-keeping requirement on us. (ii) While they would help identify things, they would not make a useful contribution to finding them, since RFCs are not distributed through normal "book" sources. They would have one small advantage: while an ISSN would apply to the entire RFC series, if we used ISBNs we could, in principle, assign numbers to standards-track documents only. On the other hand, that (like other things that have been suggested in the past) is just too subtle to do us any good in the area of distinguishing between "standard" and "RFC" -- anyone who has enough clues to make the distinction on this basis will have enough clues to read the header and boilerplate. john _______________________________________________ IETF mailing list IETF@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
- ISSN for RFC Series under Consideration Ray Pelletier
- Re: ISSN for RFC Series under Consideration eburger
- Re: ISSN for RFC Series under Consideration Melinda Shore
- RE: ISSN for RFC Series under Consideration David Harrington
- Re: ISSN for RFC Series under Consideration Randy Presuhn
- Re: ISSN for RFC Series under Consideration Pete Resnick
- Re: ISSN for RFC Series under Consideration Melinda Shore
- Re: [IAOC] ISSN for RFC Series under Consideration Ray Pelletier
- Re: [IAOC] ISSN for RFC Series under Consideration Pete Resnick
- Re: ISSN for RFC Series under Consideration Paul Hoffman
- Re: ISSN for RFC Series under Consideration Steve Crocker
- Re: ISSN for RFC Series under Consideration Stephane Bortzmeyer
- Re: ISSN for RFC Series under Consideration Dave Crocker
- Re: ISSN for RFC Series under Consideration TS Glassey
- Re: ISSN for RFC Series under Consideration Melinda Shore
- Re: ISSN for RFC Series under Consideration Julian Reschke
- RE: ISSN for RFC Series under Consideration Eastlake III Donald-LDE008
- RE: ISSN for RFC Series under Consideration Dave Cridland
- RE: [IAOC] ISSN for RFC Series under Consideration Richard Shockey
- Re: ISSN for RFC Series under Consideration Brian E Carpenter
- Re: ISSN for RFC Series under Consideration Melinda Shore
- Re: ISSN for RFC Series under Consideration John Levine
- Re: ISSN for RFC Series under Consideration Frank Ellermann
- Re: ISSN for RFC Series under Consideration Eric Rescorla
- Re: ISSN for RFC Series under Consideration Hallam-Baker, Phillip
- Re: ISSN for RFC Series under Consideration Brian E Carpenter
- RE: ISSN for RFC Series under Consideration Ed Juskevicius
- Re: ISSN for RFC Series under Consideration Bill Manning
- Re: ISSN for RFC Series under Consideration Bill Manning
- Re: ISSN for RFC Series under Consideration John C Klensin
- Re: ISSN for RFC Series under Consideration John C Klensin
- Re: ISSN for RFC Series under Consideration John C Klensin
- Re: ISSN for RFC Series under Consideration Tom.Petch
- Re: ISSN for RFC Series under Consideration Melinda Shore
- Re: ISSN for RFC Series under Consideration Henning Schulzrinne
- Re: ISSN for RFC Series under Consideration John C Klensin
- Re: ISSN for RFC Series under Consideration Marshall Eubanks
- Re: ISSN for RFC Series under Consideration Melinda Shore
- Re: ISSN for RFC Series under Consideration Steve Crocker
- Re: ISSN for RFC Series under Consideration John C Klensin
- Re: ISSN for RFC Series under Consideration Marshall Eubanks
- RE: ISSN for RFC Series under Consideration Ed Juskevicius
- RE: ISSN for RFC Series under Consideration John C Klensin
- Re: ISSN for RFC Series under Consideration Marshall Eubanks
- Re: ISSN for RFC Series under Consideration John C Klensin
- Re: ISSN for RFC Series under Consideration Bill Manning
- Re: ISSN for RFC Series under Consideration Nevil Brownlee
- Re: ISSN for RFC Series under Consideration John C Klensin
- RE: ISSN for RFC Series under Consideration John C Klensin
- Re: ISSN for RFC Series under Consideration John C Klensin
- Re: ISSN for RFC Series under Consideration Cullen Jennings
- Re: ISSN for RFC Series under Consideration Bob Braden
- Re: ISSN for RFC Series under Consideration Frank Ellermann
- Re: ISSN for RFC Series under Consideration John C Klensin
- Re: ISSN for RFC Series under Consideration Marshall Eubanks
- Re: ISSN for RFC Series under Consideration Stephane Bortzmeyer
- Re: ISSN for RFC Series under Consideration Stephane Bortzmeyer
- RE: ISSN for RFC Series under Consideration Hallam-Baker, Phillip
- Re: ISSN for RFC Series under Consideration Marshall Eubanks
- RE: ISSN for RFC Series under Consideration Hallam-Baker, Phillip
- Re: [IAOC] ISSN for RFC Series under Consideration Marshall Eubanks
- Re: ISSN for RFC Series under Consideration Marshall Eubanks
- Re: ISSN for RFC Series under Consideration Frank Ellermann
- RE: [IAOC] ISSN for RFC Series under Consideration Eastlake III Donald-LDE008
- RE: ISSN for RFC Series under Consideration Glen Zorn