Re: [Tools-discuss] The Document Citation Tool is (somewhat) broken

[Jay Daley <[e-mail]>]

(moving discussion to tools-discuss)

Ole

> On 29/06/2021, at 6:36 AM, Ole Jacobsen <olejacobsen=[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> 
> Hi,
> 
> Several years ago, Henrik set up this wonderful tool that creates citations for
> IETF documents (IDs and RFCs) in a standard format. The tool is customizable
> and lives here:
> 
> https://tools.ietf.org/tools/citation/
> 
> Enter, for example, "7575" in the box and you get:
> 
> Clemm, A., Behringer, M., Jiang, S., Pritikin, M., Ciavaglia, L., Bjarnason, S., and B. Carpenter,
> "Autonomic Networking: Definitions and Design Goals," RFC 7575, June 2015.
> 
> It's something I use often to get a consistent list of references in
> articles.
> 
> But, sadly, something is currently broken with this tool, or I suspect something has
> changed in the back-end (datatracker or tools?) whereby recent RFCs are not recognized,
> for example: RFC 8890 gives me: "Could not find author data for document 'rfc8990'"
> 
> And worse: RFC 8995 returns: "An error occurred at this point in the web-page generation.
> An error report has been sent to the webmaster. If this error isn't fixed within 48 hours,
> please contact the web page author directly at [e-mail]."
> 
> I know Henrik is probably no longer maintaining this tool so I am not blaming him
> or expecting him to fix it, but perhaps someone from the tools/datatracker group could
> take a look at this? It really is a VERY nice tool and I would hate to see it disabled
> forever.
> 
> Thanks in advance!

An RFP was recently awarded [1] for a replacement for the citation library generation and access (API and web page) tool. Unfortunately, when writing that RFP I didn’t know about this specific tool and so it is not listed as a deliverable.  However, it should be relatively straightforward to add simple output of this format, though a fully programmable output format is more complex and I’m not sure it is necessary.  Do you use that programmable output functionality?

Jay

[1] https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/ietf-announce/XPvRg0vSCWUBaSxtX1jSVtsNb3I/

> 
> Ole
> 
> 
> Ole J. Jacobsen
> Editor and Publisher
> The Internet Protocol Journal
> Office: [phone]
> Cell:   [phone]
> Web: protocoljournal.org
> E-mail: [e-mail]
> E-mail: [e-mail]
> Skype: organdemo
> 
> 

-- 
Jay Daley
IETF Executive Director
[e-mail]