[rfc-i] RFCs and Digital Object Identifiers

[brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com (Brian E Carpenter)]

Sure, John, I sort of understood why it happened that way - no problem
(but people *will* guess DOIs of course).

Regards
   Brian

On 17/05/2015 14:43, John Levine wrote:
>> Is there a reason you inserted leading zeros, as in
>> http://dx.doi.org/10.17487/RFC0020 ?
>>
>> (I assume there is no magic in 4 digits, since the
>> series will not end at RFC9999.)
> 
> Hi, grunt programmer here.
> 
> The DOIs are based on the doc-id field in the XML index rfc-index.xml.
> If you look at the XML schema in rfc-index.xsd, you'll see
> 
> 	    <xsd:pattern value="RFC\d{4}"/>
> 
>>From the comments in the file, it appears that it's been that way at
> least since 2003, so it didn't seem like a good idea to invent
> something different.  Presumably someday that 4 will change to 4,5 but
> I doubt that pre-RFC 1000 doc-id's will change.
> 
> Please keep in mind that by design, DOIs are opaque, and you should
> not assume that you can guess the DOI of an RFC or any other document
> from bibliographic info.  For example, all of the ACM's DOIs are just
> dot separated pairs of long numbers with no relationship I can see to
> year, volume, page number, or anything else.
> 
> R's,
> John
> 
> 
>