[rfc-i] request to deprecate numeric citations in xml2rfc

[Paul Hoffman / VPNC]

At 10:11 PM -0800 1/11/05, Joe Touch wrote:
>It would be useful, IMO, in both places to have some suggested 
>formats for such references. The IEEE version is:
>
>	To85	(Touch 1985)
>	ToEg92	(Touch Eggert 1992)
>
>I.e., use the first two letters of the first author's last name, 
>adding up to one additional author, and the last two digits of 
>publication year. Collisions are resolved by lower-case alphabet:
>	To85a
>	To85b
>
>(all have a suffix if any do).

I have always found those references almost impossible to read and 
difficult to use when a paper references many things by the same 
author.

>There are other versions that work:
>	Touch85
>	Touch1985
>	Touch-85
>etc. It doesn't matter which one, but it'd be useful to at least 
>suggest  something (even if it isn't desirable to enforce).

Those are better, but still not as good as strings that simply 
describe what the reference is for, such as:
      AuthMethods
      RFCWriting
      TaoOfTheIETF

Please do *not* standardize on an author-based naming system.

>Also, IMO it'd be useful to cite RFCs uniformly as:
>
>	RFCNNNN
>or	RFC-NNNN
>
>(always using 4 digits? or using 3?)
>
>Thoughts? Preferences?

My preference has been to RFCNNNN, and I don't think we need to 
left-pad-with-zeros two- and three-digit RFC numbers.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--VPN Consortium