Re: In support of symbolic references

[Simon Josefsson <simon at josefsson.org>]

"Steven M. Bellovin" <smb at cs.columbia.edu> writes:

> On Thu, 05 Apr 2007 22:19:11 +0200
> Simon Josefsson <simon at josefsson.org> wrote:
>
>> Sam Hartman <hartmans-ietf at mit.edu> writes:
>> 
>> > Hi.  I'm sitting here reviewing changes to a document to see if I
>> > can last call it.
>> >
>> > As part of a response to AD review comments, one of the references
>> > were changed.  This document uses numeric references.  Starting at
>> > reference 16, everything was renumbered.  That makes the diff a
>> > pain.
>> >
>> > For this and many other reasons, I strongly encourage people to
>> > avoid numeric references in their documents.
>> 
>> That makes sense, but I believe the default for the xml2rfc tool is to
>> produce numeric references.  Does xml2rfc support symbolic references?
>> If the defaults in xml2rfc is changed to symbolic references, I think
>> we'd see that a lot of documents would adopt the new approach.
>> 
> Use the line
>
> 	<?rfc symrefs="yes" ?>
>
> to get symbolic references.

Neat.  Maybe we can lobby for it to become the default.  Is there some
IDNit rule that suggest or imply that references should be numeric?  A
lot of documents have numeric references, so I could imagine that it
is used in some examples, and therefor used by default by tools.

/Simon

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