[xml2rfc-dev] feedback on <stream>

[Julian Reschke <[e-mail]>]

Hi there,

so I stumbled across the element <stream>, used in the test file
elements.xml (in the svn repo).

Source:

> 	 <reference anchor="RFC7997" target="https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7997" quote-title="true">
> 	    <stream>IAB</stream>
> 	    <front>
> 	       <title>The Use of Non-ASCII Characters in RFCs</title>
> 	       <author fullname="Heather Flanagan" role="editor">
> 		  <organization/>
> 	       </author>
> 	       <date year="2016" month="December"/>
> ... > 	    </front>
> 	    <seriesInfo name="RFC" value="7997"/>
> 	    <seriesInfo name="DOI" value="10.17487/RFC7997"/>
> 	 </reference>

The text output is:

>    [RFC7997]  Flanagan, H., Ed., "The Use of Non-ASCII Characters in
>               RFCs", IAB, RFC 7997, DOI 10.17487/RFC7997, December 2016,
>               <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7997>.

Removing it yields:

>    [RFC7997]  Flanagan, H., Ed., "The Use of Non-ASCII Characters in
>               RFCs", RFC 7997, DOI 10.17487/RFC7997, December 2016,
>               <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7997>.

...so the contents is inserted between title and series information.

Question: is there an actual requirement for this? I checked the style
guide and related information and could not find anything.

*If* this is indeed needed, my preference would be to name/define the
element more general terms; not in a way totally specific to IETF documents.

Best regards, Julian