I think I must misunderstand what you're trying to say, because this reads as the other half, and does not address what I think Terry proposed: The embedded values in the RFCs are held to be immutable, but these contact strings are anything but immutable, as we all know. user@host is not a constant which alters the normative force or semantics of a document, its a reference to the authors. If the author reference in an RFC was abstracted to a DOI or an ORCID or similar, noting Phils comments to the need to make it trustable through cryptography, then the document suffers no loss of information, when the user@host has to change. That crytographic management is btw completely outside the RFC process. It manages a value expressed into an RFC. An abstracted contact ID could be external, or could be internal. I prefer internal, managed inside IETF process, and amenable to an XML definition so it can be tokenised properly in the web display and datatracker. Ie its not "listing the emails" its tying the identity information of the author to something outside of the RFC which can itself remain substantively immutable, when emails change. G On Thu, Aug 15, 2024 at 11:47 AM Brian E Carpenter <brian.e.carpenter@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Terry, > > We effectively have that already. Try these: > > https://datatracker.ietf.org/person/sob@xxxxxxxxxxx > https://datatracker.ietf.org/person/terry@xxxxxxxxxx > https://datatracker.ietf.org/person/brian@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx > > The only issue I see is that if you have no formal role (lucky me!), no current email address is listed. That could be an option in the user's profile, or "author" could be added as a new role. (If you like that, we could discuss it at tools-discuss@xxxxxxxx) > > Regards > Brian Carpenter > > On 15-Aug-24 11:46, Terry Manderson wrote: > > > > > >> On 15 Aug 2024, at 7:54 AM, touch@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote: > >> > >> Although I appreciate the impact this has to our RFCs, we all experience this (touch@xxxxxxx is no more as well), though perhaps not to the same degree. > >> > >> I’ll step in here to defend Harvard’s decision; having an email available to someone who no longer holds an official position is a significant legal risk. > >> > >> Emails, URLs, and even RFC numbers change (remember back when TCP was “always” RFC793?). Search engines mitigate this problem, as would (preferably) a bounce message from Harvard providing the next known email, at least for a while. > >> > >> Joe > >> > > > > I'm looking at this from the impact to the RFCs and the link between RFC authors and other inquisitive minds. Especially while the author is still interested in responding to email questions. > > > > I wonder if a level of abstraction can be created through an "author profile" that ties together all past author's address blocks and can provide the "latest known" address. > > > > Just a thought. > > > > Cheers, > > Terry
