Re: How to pay $47 for a copy of RFC 793

[Julian Reschke <[e-mail]>]

On 10.05.2011 03:44, John C Klensin wrote:
> John,
>
> Depends on where you look.  DOIs are popular in some
> communities, URNs in others, and, of course, some communities
> have not discovered either.  For most purposes, DOIs and URNs
> can be considered functionally equivalent, but one of the
> differences is that if we had to pay the usual fees for DOIs to
> assign them to RFCs, we might have to start charging for RFCs to
> cover those costs :-).  For more on the URN approach to
> identifying articles, papers, and similar things, you might look
> in on what the URNBIS WG is doing and why.

Reminder: we have a URN scheme of IETF documents. Maybe we should use it.

> Mark's (slightly tongue in cheek, I think) suggestion of URLs
> actually doesn't work because they generally identify locations
> at which objects can be found, rather than the object itself
> (location-independent).  But that is orthogonal to the question
> of preferences for DOIs versus URNs.

Well, if the organization minting the HTTP URIs is committed to 
stability, they are almost as good as URNs. Or better, given the fact 
that you can drop them into the address bar of a browser :-)

Best regards, Julian