--On Thursday, July 09, 2015 12:47 -0400 Keith Moore
<moore(_at_)network-heretics(_dot_)com> wrote:
On 07/09/2015 12:33 PM, Joel M. Halpern wrote:
Did anyone earlier ask the RFC Editor to change the reference
format for RFCs from RFCxyzw to urn:ietf:rfc:xyzw?
I don't know about "changing the reference format", but such
references (both human- and machine-readable) should include
the URNs.
I don't even know what "references format means". If you are
referring to the DOI suffix, I think it would be a less-and-good
idea, but see John Levine's comments about opaque identifiers.
And if the RFC Editor made such a change, would it help any
user of the RFCs in understanding or following the
reference?
URN resolution services (several of which do exist) could add
'ietf' to the set of URN namespaces that they support. The
RFC Editor already makes the information available in
machine-readable format, it just doesn't include the URNs.
Ideally IETF and/or RSE should operate an authoritative
resolution service for the 'ietf' URN namespace. I'd be
happy to supply the code.
New code is perhaps unnecessary: I note that a zone for urn.arpa
already exists. The delegation or NAPTR records for
"ietf.urn.arpa" and "rfc.urn.arpa" don't seem to be there, but
the framework for DDDS resolution is certainty in place should
someone chose to task someone (presumably IANA) with creating
the zone and task someone (presumably the RFC Editor) with
populating the NAPTR records.
john