(distro trimmed -- I assume everyone participating in this
interminable discussion is on the IETF list)
--On Thursday, 01 December, 2005 17:38 -0500 Robert Sayre
<sayrer@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 12/1/05, Hallam-Baker, Phillip <pbaker@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>> On a point of information, most of the references I see in
>> existing RFCs are to sections in any case.
>
> I suspect this is because almost everyone refers to an HTML
> version in informal communication.
Bad inference, I think. We have had explicit guidelines (some,
I think, in various versions of "Instructions to RFC Authors")
that express a preference for section references. There are
many ways to scan (visually) an RFC, or to find material in it
online using an ASCII text editor (think ED and its clones, not
just emacs/vi), that make section numbers much easier to find
than page numbers and paragraphs. Section numbers are related
to actual content and context, which is usually what people are
trying to reference.
I think that, if you went back to archives old enough that there
was no HTML alternative because there was no HTML, you would
still find that the overwhelming number of references into RFCs,
informal and formal, used page numbers.
john
_______________________________________________
Ietf@xxxxxxxx
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf