> On 2021-10-17, at 21:52, Russ Housley <housley@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>
>
>> On Oct 17, 2021, at 8:54 AM, Carsten Bormann <cabo@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>> On 2021-10-17, at 14:47, John C Klensin <john-ietf@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>>>
>>> FWIW, I have no idea whether permission was obtained to extract
>>> and reproduce material from X3.4-1968 to act as the basis for
>>> RFC 20 or whether the conclusion at the time was that it was not
>>> necessary.
>>
>> (Random fuzzy recollection: I seem to remember that what made me start campaigning for RFC 20 to be a STD was that I wanted to stop people from referencing X3.4 just in order to avoid a downref.)
>>
>> We should do this more often.
>
> Wouldn't it have been trivial to add RFC 20 to the downref registry?
To those that know about that concept, yes.
To those that knee-jerk to an idnits throw-away comment, not so sure.
> Of course, there is no need to do it now that it is a standard.
>
> 0020 ASCII format for network interchange. V.G. Cerf. October 1969.
> (Format: TXT, PDF, HTML) (Also STD0080) (Status: INTERNET STANDARD)
> (DOI: 10.17487/RFC0020)
Indeed, and I think the outcome was a well-deserved advancement.
The only RFC that survived from the 1960s or 1970s in std-index…
.oOo.
But back to the subject: maybe we need a “behind-the-wall-ref” registry…
E.g., in IoT we sometimes need to exchange data about temperatures.
The quantities and units for that are defined in ISO/IEC 80000, which is paywalled.
(Fortunately, the actual definitions in that tome are in the “Definitions” section, most of which are freely available via “OBP” [e.g., [1]] — but that is just distracting from my point.)
Of course, we can point to secondary sources such as BIPM’s SI brochure [2], but we wouldn’t accept a document referencing TLS via Wikipedia, would we?
So once we have decided we can reference ISO/IEC 80000 with impunity (*), it should be put into a behind-the-wall-ref registry.
Grüße, Carsten
(*) which seems to have happened with RFC 8428 and RFC 8798
[1] https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#iso:std:iso:80000:-3:ed-2:v1:en
[2] https://www.bipm.org/documents/20126/41483022/SI-Brochure-9.pdf/fcf090b2-04e6-88cc-1149-c3e029ad8232
