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Re: ISSN for RFC Series under Consideration

2008-05-22 02:52:46


--On Thursday, 22 May, 2008 02:38 -0700 Bill Manning
<bmanning(_at_)ISI(_dot_)EDU> wrote:

Two additional observations:

(1) While we think of RFCs as online documents, their
antecedents, and all of the early ones, were paper
publications.
[elided]
I suggest that the community would be better served, and the
ISSN made more useful, if we treated RFCs as "authoritative
paper, copies available online" rather than "online
documents".   If that requires the RFC Editor or IASA to
print out all of the RFCs published in a given month, throw
them into an envelope, and put the envelope into the smail, I
imagine we can afford that.

      there is historical precident for this.

Yes, I know -- both about the paper and the "toss into an
envelope" bit.  Even the idea of a standard page-image format is
a lot more recent than many people realize.

      my question earlier, regarding the whole series,
      includes early, paper-only RFC's, historic, etc.
      so the folks thinking that a simple change in the 
      current tools set will make it all good might have
      overlooked dealing w/ legacy documents.

The ISSN rules quite explicitly do not require that we go back
and reissue entries in the serious prior to the assignment of a
number.   So, unless we make explicit (and slightly complicated)
provisions to the contrary, assignment of an ISSN sweeps in all
RFCs back to #0001 but the identifier only needs to be included
in RFCs issued after the assignment date (or some other
convenient date that the RFC Editor picks).

      there are also books already published that are RFC
      compilations.  they already have ISSN numbers.

No, they have ISBN numbers.  And, although it is not a big deal,
this is yet another reason why an ISSN is a better idea.
Whether they are issued by the publisher or someone else,
assigning ISBNs to bound compilations of issues of a serial is
quite a routine event.  Another reason, of course, is that RFCs
really are a series -- that is more or less the whole point.

    john

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