In the middle of the I-D cutoff madness last week, as I was working on the references section of two I-Ds, I wondered if I was doing the right thing by including URLs for my references.
I'm thinking that URLs are useful in the reference sections of I-Ds. Most of the references I was using were either RFCs or I-Ds that are likely to become RFCs, so maybe these are OK when (if?) my I-Ds become RFCs (because most of the I-D references will be RFCs by then).
Most of the rest of my references were to papers from places like SIGCOMM. I would like to think that including a URL for them, even in an RFC, is the best I can do (of course, I don't know where these papers will be in 25 years, as Bob points out), even if they do move, as long as I include enough bibliographic material that someone could chase my references down if they HAVE moved ("Scotty?", "Aye, Captain?", "Where are the SIGCOMM archives this week?").
The references I was most concerned about (just to show why Bob's concerns seem real to me) are e-mail postings from Van Jacobson about the early days of slow start/congestion avoidance. While looking up URLs a few minutes ago, I noted that the URLs that pointed to Rich Steven's home page, which is where I saw them, have moved to http://www.kohala.com/start/, courtesy of Gary Wright (Rich's co-author), after Rich passed away - which seems like about the most unanswerable reason for a URL to become stale that *I* can think of.
Are there gigabytes of discussions about this topic in the archives already?
Spencer
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Friday, October 29, 1999 6:17 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: Citation bug in RFC 2425
BTW,
Using a URL in a citation in an RFC seems like a bad idea. There may
be exceptions, e.g., an IETF.org or RFC-Editor.org URL might be less
risky. But expecting a URL in general to stay invariant for 25 years
seems dubious.
Bob Braden
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