Re: [xml2rfc] can xref section= reference an anchor?

[Julian Reschke <[e-mail]>]

On 17.12.2019 07:17, Carsten Bormann wrote:
> On Dec 17, 2019, at 06:58, Julian Reschke <[e-mail]> wrote:
>>
>> IDs and RFCs, once published, are immutable.
>>
>> A *published* draft usually should not reference parts of editor's copy
>> of another draft.
>>
>> What *does* work (and that's what I was referring to) is having
>> auto-computed references between drafts that are published in sync, such
>> as currently the three http-core specs.
>
> As usual, there is confusion between the authoring language and the publishing language.
>
> The desired feature here is to have references to other documents in the authoring language that update automatically.
>
> The time of commit is the time of publishing.  In the publishing language, there must not be references to information that changes, such as an unnumbered reference to an I-D.  Converting to plain text previously made sure that the commitment process happens.  Now, the conversion from the authoring language to the publishing language needs to be done by separate tool, which we tend to call “prep tool”.
>
> Julian, you are familiar with doing this between drafts published at the same time, but synchronized publishing is not at all a prerequisite to references (bibxml, section numbers/names) that auto-update.
> ...

Yes, but.

In the case of independant submission times and for draft-foo
referencing draft-bar, you need to freeze the reference to draft-bar whe
  publishing draft-foo.

That is something that needs to be done at submission time, and it *can*
be automated. We don't *need* vocabulary support for that (but of course
we can discuss what could be done to simplify this).

Best regards, Julian