editorial comment to 2009-07 idnabis draft

[John C Klensin]

--On Thursday, July 16, 2009 21:50 +0100 Vint Cerf
<vint at google.com> wrote:

> I think the conflict with editor's standards dictates no
> change. Perhaps the point might be made to the rfc editor as a
> matter of common interest? V

The problem is that, in general, the RFC  Editor doesn't like
including references to transient documents like I-Ds.  When
these documents are published as RFCs, they will presumably all
be published together, the I-D references will be resolved into
RFC ones, and there will be no issue.

With regard to the RFCs themselves (such as the base DNS
references), my basic policy, as editor, is to cite them the
first time they appear in the document and then again only when
the pointers seem particularly important since a bracketed
pointer to a reference gets very ugly in running text.  That is
also consistent with long-standing RFC conventions but is
inconvenient for anything trying to create hyperlinks for each
and every time the external spec is referenced.

I'm willing to change my mind about this if you tell me to or if
there is strong evidence that it will make the WG more
efficient, but it otherwise appears to me to be extra work with
fairly little substantive payoff.

   john


    john