--On Monday, May 09, 2011 23:41 +0000 John Levine
<johnl(_at_)iecc(_dot_)com> wrote:
In article <516EBEA6-E089-4952-AE33-DE799E37548A(_at_)mnot(_dot_)net> you
write:
If only there were some uniform resource locator system,
whereby we could use a string to both identify and locate
such a document, and include such a string *in* our
specifications.
It exists, it's called a DOI. I don't understand them well
enough yet to have an opinion whether it would be worth the
hassle and possible cost of assigning DOIs to RFCs. But if
you look in Xplore and the ACM DL, just about everything has
one.
John,
Depends on where you look. DOIs are popular in some
communities, URNs in others, and, of course, some communities
have not discovered either. For most purposes, DOIs and URNs
can be considered functionally equivalent, but one of the
differences is that if we had to pay the usual fees for DOIs to
assign them to RFCs, we might have to start charging for RFCs to
cover those costs :-). For more on the URN approach to
identifying articles, papers, and similar things, you might look
in on what the URNBIS WG is doing and why.
Mark's (slightly tongue in cheek, I think) suggestion of URLs
actually doesn't work because they generally identify locations
at which objects can be found, rather than the object itself
(location-independent). But that is orthogonal to the question
of preferences for DOIs versus URNs.
john
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