Re: In support of symbolic references

[John C Klensin <john-ietf at jck.com>]

--On Saturday, April 07, 2007 5:52 PM +0200 Julian Reschke 
<julian.reschke at gmx.de> wrote:

> ...
> > Second, because of the desire to create a universal naming
> > scheme in the bibliographical libraries, xml2rfc ends up with
> > symbolic references that look like
> > [I-D.rfc-editor-rfc2223bis] (one of the less unattractive
> > ones) or, potentially,
> > [I-D.draft-narten-iana-considerations-rfc2434-bis].  Those
> > things cause formatting problems, violate almost every known
> > style manual about forms for symbolic references, and so on.
> > If our tools permitted us to use the forms that are
> > recommended in the rest of the world, such as "[Nart07a]" for
> > the above, it would be different.  But they don't permit
> > doing so conveniently.
>
> But that's only a problem if you insist to re-use the ID
> references provided by xml.resource.org verbatim. If you
> instead just paste them in, you can change the anchor to
> whatever you like.
>
> In general, I think that referring to IDs by referencing the
> bib entry is very dangerous, because one may miss important
> changes like section numbering or changes in BNF names when
> the draft being referred to progresses.

Well, we agree and that is what I've generally been doing.  But, 
having recently had a colleague who took over a document 
carefully remove my pasted-in I-D references in order to replace 
them with library pointers just before forwarding to the RFC 
Editor, I'm a little sensitive to this one and suspect that some 
additional guidance to the community would be in order.

best,
     john


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