Re: [urn] Adam Roach's No Objection on draft-ietf-urnbis-ns-reg-transition-08: (with COMMENT)

[Eric Rescorla <[e-mail]>]

On Tue, Aug 1, 2017 at 3:29 PM, John C Klensin <[e-mail]> wrote:

> Adam,
>
> While I disagree with your comments, thanks for the careful
> reading.
>
> Several comments and clarifications below, with the
> understanding that these are my opinions only and that, if there
> is evidence of WG or IETF consensus to the contrary, I'm happy
> to make changes...
>
> --On Tuesday, August 1, 2017 14:23 -0700 Adam Roach
> <[e-mail]> wrote:
>
> > Adam Roach has entered the following ballot position for
> > draft-ietf-urnbis-ns-reg-transition-08: No Objection
> >
> > When responding, please keep the subject line intact and reply
> > to all email addresses included in the To and CC lines. (Feel
> > free to cut this introductory paragraph, however.)
> >
> >
> > Please refer to
> > https://www.ietf.org/iesg/statement/discuss-criteria.html for
> > more information about IESG DISCUSS and COMMENT positions.
> >
> >
> > The document, along with other ballot positions, can be found
> > here:
> > https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-urnbis-ns-reg-tran
> > sition/
> >
> >
> >
> > --------------------------------------------------------------
> > -------- COMMENT:
> > --------------------------------------------------------------
> > --------
> >
> > Major comment:
> >
> > Section 3 has suggested changes for RFC3188 for the next time
> > it is revised. It's not clear, outside of institutional
> > knowledge (which is a very fragile construct) how the
> > indicated changes are going to be properly remembered when
> > such revision takes place. Is there a good reason this
> > document doesn't simply update RFC3188 by indicating an
> > updated template directly? If this doesn't make sense, I would
> > think that we need at least an erratum associated with RFC3188
> > that indicates the nature of update that needs to be performed.
>
> The problem is this.  RFC 3188 was never an IETF WG document.
> It will be replaced by a new RFC, most likely in the Independent
> Stream unless you are one of your colleagues are interested in
> sponsoring it as an Informational individual submission.  Juha
> and I have been working intermittently on a draft; the hold-up
> right now is mostly me, for which I apologize but I have been
> tied up with other IETF-related work that seemed to be more
> pressing.  There are twp reasons why an updated template is not
> directly referenced: it isn't ready due to evolution in NBNs and
> it seemed inappropriate for the WG to make promises about what
> would be in it.  FWIW, the specific things that this draft calls
> out have already been incorporated in the working draft for
> 3188bis.
>
> > Minor comments:
> >
> > The draft header indicates that this document obsoletes
> > RFC3044 and RFC3187, but the abstract doesn't mention this,
> > which it should.
>
> Disagree.  Those are informational documents, not standards
> track ones, the abstract correctly reflects what the document
> does, and the relationships are carefully explained in Section
> 2.  Cluttering up the abstract by putting in those RFC numbers
> seems neither desirable nor appropriate and this should
> reasonably be an editorial matter under the control of the RFC
> Editor, not something specified by the IESG.
>
> > The document has at least nine places where external documents
> > are mentioned but which are not, themselves, reference
> > citations (e.g., "RFC 8141"  rather than "[RFC8141]" in
> > section 2). This will interact poorly with some RFC-related
> > tooling. Please change these to references.
>
> This, again, is an RFC Editor question and a stylistic issue.
> As far as I know, each of those documents is cited correctly on
> first appearance (including RFC 8141, which is cited in Section
> 1).  Repeating those citation anchors each time the RFC (or
> other document) is referenced does not add to either readability
> or provide useful information for the user.    I note that
> neither the RFC Style Guide (RFC 7322) nor the plain text
> requirements (RFC 7994) require a citation anchor each time a
> document is mentioned.   If the IESG would like to impose such a
> requirement (in spite of advice against it in several style
> manuals), I believe it should be a topic for discussion between
> the IESG and the RFC Editor, not an IESG review comment on
> particular documents.
>

Speaking for myself, I would vastly prefer that when people cite RFCs by
number, those RFCs be actual citations. The reason for this is that those
can then be linkified.

-Ekr


>
> It may be worth mentioning that, despite the observation that
> some RFC authors have adopted the convention and the RFC Editor,
> in their wisdom, has chosen to let it go, the use of a citation
> anchor as the subject of a sentence or predicate of a sentence,
> object of a preposition, etc. (e.g., "as discussed in
> [RFC8141]") is prohibited by every style manual for the English
> language that I've been able to find except those who consider
> the construction such a grave grammatical error as to not be
> worth mentioning.  Perhaps the issue is most easily clarified by
> assuming RFCs are pretty-printed and "[RFC8141]" above were
> replaced by a superscript numeral.
>
> Of course, if documents were referenced without being cited
> properly at all, I'd be delighted to fix that when the problems
> are identified unless the RFC Editor gets to it first.
>
>
>