Subject: [xml2rfc] BCP references

From: Julian Reschke <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2012 09:28:55 +0200

Hi there,

I recently encountered:

       <reference anchor='BCP9'>
           <front>
             <title abbrev='Internet Standards Process'>The Internet 
Standards Process -- Revision 3</title>
             <author initials='S.' surname='Bradner' fullname='Scott O. 
Bradner'/>
             <date year='1996' month='October' />
           </front>
           <seriesInfo name='BCP' value='9' />
           <seriesInfo name='RFC' value='2026' />
           <seriesInfo name='RFC' value='6410' />
       </reference>

Note that it has *two* seriesInfo entries of type "RFC".

There are (at least) two ways to look at his:

1) BCP 9 indeed consists of these RFCs, so the citation is correct.

2) The vocabulary (<http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2629#section-2.4.1>) 
defines seriesInfo as:

   ...The "seriesInfo" element has two attributes, "name" and "value" 
that identify the document series and series entry, respectively...

Note the term "identify" here: RFC 6410 does not identify the document 
(only part of it), so there's a problem here.

When generating HTML, implementations currently produce a hyperlink to 
the first RFC mentioned, which of course is the wrong thing to do.

If we ever get to revising the vocabulary, we should think about how to 
reference collections of documents...

Best regards, Julian

---

From: "Martin J. Dürst" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2012 16:36:17 +0900

BCP 47 is another example of a BCP that consists of more than one RFC. 
This is explicitly mentioned at the top of 
http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/bcp/bcp47.txt, which is otherwise a 
concatenation of the two relevant RFCs (RFC 5646 and RFC 4647). This 
also seems to have been done for 
http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/bcp/bcp9.txt. The problem is that this is 
really quite rare. But it's still important to get it right.

Regards,   Martin.

On 2012/06/12 16:28, Julian Reschke wrote:
> <title abbrev='Internet Standards Process'>The Internet Standards
> Process -- Revision 3</title>
> <author initials='S.' surname='Bradner' fullname='Scott O. Bradner'/>
> ...The "seriesInfo" element has two attributes, "name" and "value" that
> identify the document series and series entry, respectively...
>
> _______________________________________________
> xml2rfc mailing list
> [email-masked]
> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/xml2rfc
>

---

From: Julian Reschke <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2012 09:50:46 +0200

On 2012-06-12 09:36, "Martin J. Dürst" wrote:
> ...

Another problem related to this is that rfcmarkup doesn't handle it well 
(it doesn't expect concatenations of documents).

Best regards, Julian

---

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2012 09:32:34 +0100

> (it doesn't expect concatenations of documents).

Two comments:

1. This was a conscious choice at some time in the past, when people
started citing BCP numbers - so that they would get the whole BCP from
the cited URL. It is supposed to be done for every multi-part BCP.

2. As a matter of fact, the same thing was done for STD numbers,
see http://www.rfc-editor.org/std-index.html, or for a specific
example, http://www.rfc-editor.org/std/std5.txt. However, people
have never taken to citing STD numbers, probably because the
Internet runs on Proposed Standards.

    Brian

---

From: Alice Russo <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2012 12:00:02 -0400

For creating a reference element for a subseries identifier that contains more than one RFC (for example: BCP 9 or STD 62) -- from the perspective of the RFC Production Center, this text is recommended:

  [BCP9]     Bradner, S., "The Internet Standards Process -- Revision
             3", BCP 9, RFC 2026, October 1996.

             Dusseault, L. and R. Sparks, "Guidance on Interoperation
             and Implementation Reports for Advancement to Draft
             Standard", BCP 9, RFC 5657, September 2009.

             Housley, R., Crocker, D., and E. Burger, "Reducing the
             Standards Track to Two Maturity Levels", BCP 9, RFC 6410,
             October 2011.

In XML, as a work-around, the annotation element can be used to create that entry (the text can be copied & pasted from the RFC bibliographic entries on ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc-ref.txt):

	<front>
	  <title abbrev='Internet Standards Process'>The Internet Standards Process -- Revision 3</title>
	  <author initials='S.' surname='Bradner' fullname='Scott O. Bradner'>
	    <organization />
	  </author>

	  
	  <annotation>
	    Dusseault, L. and R. Sparks, "Guidance on Interoperation and Implementation Reports for Advancement to Draft Standard", BCP 9, RFC 5657, September 2009.
	  </annotation>
	  
	  <annotation>
	    Housley, R., Crocker, D., and E. Burger, "Reducing the Standards Track to Two Maturity Levels", BCP 9, RFC 6410, October 2011.
	  </annotation>
	  
	</reference>

For another example, see the reference to [STD62] in RFC 6632.

Thanks,
Alice