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

[John C Klensin <[e-mail]>]

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.

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.