I agree of course that uniqueness should be a MUST.
But while I don't feel strongly about this, I'm actually a little
reluctant to put permanent URIs to RFC. First of all, from the point of
the RFC in question the registry use is largely a publication-time
issue.
No, not really. There are basically two cases and only the second meets your
criteria:
(1) RFCs that define or augment registries.
(2) RFCs that define one or more registry entries.
Case (1) Is hardly a publication-time thing. And even in case (2), depending on
the type of registry there may be a need to check and see if something has been
changed in the entry. In the case of media types, for example, entries may be
augmented with things like additional security considerations at any time.
If I implement RFC XXX all the code points that I need are
already verbatim in the RFC.
That's false in a significant number of cases, see above.
Secondly, for some reason I feel
uncomfortable with placing a permanent pointer to the RFC, while I agree
that at times it would be helpful. Call me old-fashioned, but I fear
that something might change in, say, the next 20+ years.
That's entirely possible, but as others have pointed out, so what? If you have
the URL and it works, you save time. If the URL is broken, well, all that does
is reduce you to looking up the registry by name. So you're no worse off than
if the URL wasn't there.
By the way,
current use at least for me does not go through a search engine but
rather through indirection. I know the IANA registries page, and I
search the given registry name from that. YMMV.
I see no reason to assume that the registries page would be any more stable
than the page for a specific registry, and some reasons to assume it will be
less stable.
Another issue with using the registry index page is that it actually makes
finding some registries hard. Suppose, for example, I want to find the charset
registry. I pull up the page and search for charset. There's only one match,
and it isn't the charset registry:
IANA Charset MIB RFC 3808
Now, if you happen to notice the line underneath, saying "See Character Sets",
that might give you a clue what to search for. But that's easy to miss.
Of coruse the issue in this case is the result of a longstanding error on the
page which can (and should) be fixed. (We register charsets, not character
sets; the two are not remotely synonymous.) But that's sort of the point:
Arguing that an index page that's regularly edited by a bunch of different
people and whose contents cannot be checked mechanically in any useful sense is
going to be more stable than a bunch of URLs that are completely trivial to
check mechanically doesn't come close to passing the laugh test.
(That being said, I wonder if some tool magic would display these
references as pointers, just as already happens for normal references.)
This wierd resistance to including useful information in our documents may have
made some small amount of sense in the past when things were less clear. It is
completely silly and totally counterproductive now.
Ned
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