Larry,
Clever idea but --
(1) We already have rules against people making such
references. The RFC Editor Function has been enforcing
those rules for references within and between RFCs for
decades. After this discussion, if paying more attention
to that is even possible, I'm confident they will do it.
(2) If people are determined to break that rule, it is
not clear to me that some additional words will either
prevent their doing it or convince them to include the
format / rendering information in their references.
(3) It is also not clear to me that assorted markup
templates (not only our xml2rfc one but those of
external journals and publishers have a good place to
put that information, especially if we do not invent,
and publicize, a standard way to reference RFCs that
includes that information (which would be odd, given
that we are trying to stamp it out (see(1) above and one
or two of my earlier notes).
(4) At least for shorter documents, if people are really
determined to use page numbers but we leave them off of
paginated documents, they will simply count and then use
them (perhaps as "fifth page", rather than "page 5")
just as many of us have been counting paragraphs within
sections and referring to, e.g., "the third paragraph of
Section 5" for years.
(5) If we are going to do anything other than putting
the page numbers into the plain text form (and leaving
them in the PDF form) or trying to punish anyone who is
ignorant or backward enough to want to use the plain
text form for any purpose (presumably included
tree-hatred), then, IMO, we should just put them in
(along with the headers and footers) and move on.
john
--On Thursday, October 29, 2020 10:02 -0700 Larry Masinter
<LMM@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> If you're concerned about people seeing different pagination
> depending on format, you could change the page numbers at the
> bottom of .txt pages to be
>
> Author Shortname
> docname.txt[Page 2]
>
> and the numbers at the bottom of pages in PDF similarly to have
> docname.pdf[Page 2]
>
> where docname is either rfcNNNN or draft-ietf-wgname-NN
>
> it's better if the page identifier at the bottom of the page
> identifies the context anyway.
> Put it outside the [Page NN] brackets for backward
> compatibility :)
>
