[rfc-i] [IAB] draft-iab-xml2rfc-03: reference sorting

[julian.reschke at gmx.de (Julian Reschke)]

On 2016-03-01 19:44, Joe Hildebrand (jhildebr) wrote:
> ...
>> Hi there,
>>
>> <http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/draft-iab-xml2rfc-03.html#rfc.section.2.42.p.3>:
>>
>> "By default, the order of references is significant. Some formatters,
>> however, might be able to be requested to sort them based on their
>> anchor names."
>>
>> However
>> <http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/draft-iab-xml2rfc-03.html#rfc.section.2.45.11>:
>>
>> "Specifies whether or not the prep tool will sort the references in each
>> reference section."
>>
>> Which, by the way, is misleading; it needs to apply to any formatter.
>
> I think you and Paul have already covered this, but I wanted to be clear.  In the current design, the preptool sorts references if they need sorting.  The reference sorting thing got pretty complicated with the addition of <displayreference>, and I want all of the output formats to have the same order of references.
>
> Again, your tooling doesn't have to run the preptool everyone else is, it just has to act as if it did.

Looking at 
<https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-iab-rfcv3-preptool-01#section-5>:

>    14.  For each <reference> or <referencegroup> that has an associated
>         <displayreference>, replace the value of the "anchor" attribute
>         with the value of the "to" attribute of the associated
>         <displayreference>.

That's problematic, as the value of "to" can be a value not allowed in 
an "anchor". (BTW, by design as one of the use cases for it is to allow 
citation tags starting with digits)

Best regards, Julian