--On Thursday, 22 May, 2008 02:38 -0700 Bill Manning
<bmanning@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>> Two additional observations:
>>
>> (1) While we think of RFCs as online documents, their
>> antecedents, and all of the early ones, were paper
>> publications.
> [elided]
>> I suggest that the community would be better served, and the
>> ISSN made more useful, if we treated RFCs as "authoritative
>> paper, copies available online" rather than "online
>> documents". If that requires the RFC Editor or IASA to
>> print out all of the RFCs published in a given month, throw
>> them into an envelope, and put the envelope into the smail, I
>> imagine we can afford that.
>
> there is historical precident for this.
Yes, I know -- both about the paper and the "toss into an
envelope" bit. Even the idea of a standard page-image format is
a lot more recent than many people realize.
> my question earlier, regarding the whole series,
> includes early, paper-only RFC's, historic, etc.
> so the folks thinking that a simple change in the
> current tools set will make it all good might have
> overlooked dealing w/ legacy documents.
The ISSN rules quite explicitly do not require that we go back
and reissue entries in the serious prior to the assignment of a
number. So, unless we make explicit (and slightly complicated)
provisions to the contrary, assignment of an ISSN sweeps in all
RFCs back to #0001 but the identifier only needs to be included
in RFCs issued after the assignment date (or some other
convenient date that the RFC Editor picks).
> there are also books already published that are RFC
> compilations. they already have ISSN numbers.
No, they have ISBN numbers. And, although it is not a big deal,
this is yet another reason why an ISSN is a better idea.
Whether they are issued by the publisher or someone else,
assigning ISBNs to bound compilations of issues of a serial is
quite a routine event. Another reason, of course, is that RFCs
really are a series -- that is more or less the whole point.
john
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