Incorrect auto linking in html versions of drafts and RFCs

Mohit Sethi <mohit.m.sethi@ericsson.com> Wed, 23 May 2018 06:35 UTC

To: rfc-interest@rfc-editor.org, ietf@ietf.org
From: Mohit Sethi <mohit.m.sethi@ericsson.com>
Subject: Incorrect auto linking in html versions of drafts and RFCs
Message-ID: <885ec895-6a29-0589-5349-193da4bd7e54@ericsson.com>
Date: Wed, 23 May 2018 09:35:52 +0300
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Hi all,

I have lately been implementing some drafts and RFCs related EAP and
JSON Web formats (JWS/JWK/JWA etc.). While reading, I noticed an unusual
problem with some of the hyper links in the HTML version of drafts/RFCs.

Sometimes, there is text in a draft/RFC saying "look at section x.y.z of
some external document", the HTML version of the draft/RFC automatically
generates a hyper link for the text "section x.y.z". This hyper link
however points to the section x.y.z in the current document. In many
cases, section x.y.z does not even exist in the current document.

Here is a couple of examples from RFC 7517
(https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7517):

1. The text in section 4 reads "

returns only the lexically last duplicate member name, as specified
inSection 15.12 <https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7517#section-15.12> (The JSON Object) of ECMAScript 5.1 [ECMAScript <https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7517#ref-ECMAScript>].

The hyper link for "Section 15.12" tries to find section 15.12 in RFC
7517 which clearly does not have such a section.

2. From the same text in section 4 "

Section 6 <https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7517#section-6> of the JSON Web Algorithms (JWA) [JWA <https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7517#ref-JWA>] specification
defines multiple kinds of cryptographic keys and their associated
members.
"

The hyper link for "Section 6" links to Section 6 of the JWK document
instead of linking it to the Section 6 of the JWA document as it should!

3. Here is another example from a randomly chosen RFC. This text is
taken from RFC 8321 section 7 (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8321): "

Performance Metric Definition
template defined inSection 5.4 of [RFC6390] <https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6390#section-5.4> and the Dependencies
laid out inSection 5.5 <https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8321#section-5.5> of that document.

Here the first link correctly points to Section 5.4 of RFC6390 but the
second link points to "Section 5.5" of RFC 8321 instead of RFC6390.

Please note that I have encountered this problem several other drafts
and RFCs. What's worse, there is no way for draft authors to control
this behavior with xml2rfc. The txt and html outputs from xml2rfc do not
show these automatic hyper links. I was hoping that this is something
the RFC editor could resolve at least for all future RFCs and drafts if
not retrospectively fix existing documents.

--Mohit

PS: I wasn't sure which was the right list. Please feel free to forward
it to the right list.

Incorrect auto linking in html versions of drafts… Mohit Sethi
Re: [rfc-i] Incorrect auto linking in html versio… Ronald Tse