On 12. May 2024, at 04:17, Brian E Carpenter <brian.e.carpenter@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > On balance, maybe this draft doesn't need to be a BCP at all, because the IESG can behave as described anyway. Maybe it should be "Guidance to authors and WGs on paywalled references." (I think this is not just about paywalling, but also about making “standards” documents only available to someone who is “agreeing” to some questionable legal thicketwork. But the paywall issue is already interesting:) On the paywall issue, here is another litmus test for any guidance we might want to codify: RFC 8428 [1], among other things, defines code points (names) for units of measurements. Most of these are authoritatively defined in the ISO/IEC 80000 series. Depending on the actual publishing body of the specific element of the series, this is mostly paywalled (a glitch in the way this paywall works means that many, but not all, of the meaty parts are accessible anyway, but let’s ignore that for now). In RFC 8428, we cheated, by instead normatively referencing an openly available document from BIPM (whose web site happens to yield "Apologies for the inconvenience (500). Please try again later!” right now, but let’s ignore that as well [2]). But that doesn’t actually define all the units we use. In the followup specification RFC 8798 [3], we didn’t see a way around normatively referencing: [IEC-80000-13] IEC, "Quantities and units - Part 13: Information science and technology", Edition 1.0, IEC 80000-13, March 2008. [IEC-80000-6] IEC, "Quantities and units - Part 6: Electromagnetism", Edition 1.0, IEC 80000-6, March 2008. Should we have: — cheated by labeling these references as informative even though they are really normative? — normatively referenced a non-authoritative source instead? — normatively referenced Wikipedia, which is arguably the best reference material for much of this? — removed any kind of reference, because everyone knows what a meter, a second, a byte, a volt-ampere [notably not watt], or a volt-ampere-reactive are? — done what we did: have a normative reference to paywalled documents? Grüße, Carsten [1]: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8428.html [2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20240331022257/https://www.bipm.org/documents/20126/41483022/SI-Brochure-9-EN.pdf [3]: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8798.html -- last-call mailing list -- last-call@xxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to last-call-leave@xxxxxxxx
