I ran into a "naked" URL as a reference in someone's draft recently, and I
don't like it at all. I would like to insist that all references to
include an Author, Title, and Date as minimum, then some information about
the publication details which could include a URL. A dead URL with no info
on what it was, or how to maybe track down an equivalent copy is totally
useless.
Dave.
At 07:14 PM 10/29/99 -0500, Dawkins, Spencer (P.S.) [EXCHANGE:RICH1:2011-I]
wrote:
>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/>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]>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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---------------------------------------------------------------
David Mitton ESN: 248-4570
Consulting Engineer, Nortel Networks 978-288-4570 Direct
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