[rfc-i] Re: Guidance for References to NIST FIPS and SPs

[Carsten Bormann <[e-mail]>]

On 2025-05-05, at 19:07, Ted Harrison <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> The RPC has added guidance to the Web Portion of the Style Guide for references to two National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) document series: Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) Publications and Special Publications (SPs). Templates with examples are available on the Web Portion of the Style Guide (https://www.rfc-editor.org/styleguide/part2/#ref_nist)
> 
> Please let us know if you have any feedback or questions.

Thank you.
I am very happy that the style guide asks us to list the authors for the SP documents; that used to be contested for a while, without a plausible reason for a deviation from our usual practice.

For the authors:
Generally, when we write drafts, we can simply use the DOI of such a document, and let tools like kramdown-rfc do the work of creating the reference.
Since DOI info isn’t always perfect, there may be work left to be done in the RPC.
I generally advise against trying to anticipate that work from the author side — there is very little to be gained from playing around with the DOI information.

So, for the NIST examples in the Web style guide, we write

normative:
  DOI.10.6028/NIST.FIPS.180-4:
  DOI.10.6028/NIST.SP.800-233:

...and get:

   [DOI.10.6028_NIST.FIPS.180-4]
              "Secure hash standard", National Institute of Standards
              and Technology (U.S.), DOI 10.6028/nist.fips.180-4, 2015,
              <https://doi.org/10.6028/nist.fips.180-4>.

   [DOI.10.6028_NIST.SP.800-233]
              Chandramouli, R., Butcher, Z., and J. Callaghan, "Service
              mesh proxy models for cloud-native applications", National
              Institute of Standards and Technology (U.S.),
              DOI 10.6028/nist.sp.800-233, October 2024,
              <https://doi.org/10.6028/nist.sp.800-233>.

Of course, the anchor label may easily be overridden as desired by the document authors, say:

normative:
  NIST.FIPS.180-4: DOI.10.6028/NIST.FIPS.180-4
  NIST.SP.800-233: DOI.10.6028/NIST.SP.800-233

➔

   [NIST.FIPS.180-4]
              "Secure hash standard", National Institute of Standards
              and Technology (U.S.), DOI 10.6028/nist.fips.180-4, 2015,
              <https://doi.org/10.6028/nist.fips.180-4>.

   [NIST.SP.800-233]
              Chandramouli, R., Butcher, Z., and J. Callaghan, "Service
              mesh proxy models for cloud-native applications", National
              Institute of Standards and Technology (U.S.),
              DOI 10.6028/nist.sp.800-233, October 2024,
              <https://doi.org/10.6028/nist.sp.800-233>.

It would be nice if the DOI info included the series information NIST FIPS 180-4, NIST SP 800-233 — but that is reasonably visible from the DOI itself, and the series information may indeed be the info that the authors want to put into the anchor label.

(The example in the guide has inconsistent treatment of hyphens in the label, which become an underscore in the FIPS example and another hyphen in the SP example.)

Grüße, Carsten