[rfc-i] "canonical" URI for RFCs, BCPs

[Brian E Carpenter]

On 2010-01-27 10:18, Joe Touch wrote:
...
> AFAICT, the following pattern ought to be the one with the long-term
> commitment:
> 	
> 	http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc[0-9]+.txt

Joe is correct. I can assert this, having checked with the RFC Editor
while working on an article titled "Internet Requests for Comments (RFCs)
as Scholarly Publications", which is due out soon. Quoting:

 The proper form for RFCs is:
 http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc####.txt
 where #### is replaced with the four digit RFC number
 (for numbers below 1000, there is no leading 0).

Paul said:

> We had this discussion before, and the RFC Editor agreed to:
>         http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc[0-9]+

That's not what I was told. The archival form is still .txt.

BCPs are a bit more tricky. If you want a long term stable reference,
you must cite the constituent RFCs. As you can see from
http://www.rfc-editor.org/bcp/bcp9.txt (for example), the contents
of a BCP are mutable.

    Brian