I agree of course that uniqueness should be a MUST.
But while I don't feel strongly about this, I'm actually a little reluctant to put permanent URIs to RFC. First of all, from the point of the RFC in question the registry use is largely a publication-time issue.
No, not really. There are basically two cases and only the second meets your criteria: (1) RFCs that define or augment registries. (2) RFCs that define one or more registry entries. Case (1) Is hardly a publication-time thing. And even in case (2), depending on the type of registry there may be a need to check and see if something has been changed in the entry. In the case of media types, for example, entries may be augmented with things like additional security considerations at any time.
If I implement RFC XXX all the code points that I need are already verbatim in the RFC.
That's false in a significant number of cases, see above.
Secondly, for some reason I feel uncomfortable with placing a permanent pointer to the RFC, while I agree that at times it would be helpful. Call me old-fashioned, but I fear that something might change in, say, the next 20+ years.
That's entirely possible, but as others have pointed out, so what? If you have the URL and it works, you save time. If the URL is broken, well, all that does is reduce you to looking up the registry by name. So you're no worse off than if the URL wasn't there.
By the way, current use at least for me does not go through a search engine but rather through indirection. I know the IANA registries page, and I search the given registry name from that. YMMV.
I see no reason to assume that the registries page would be any more stable than the page for a specific registry, and some reasons to assume it will be less stable. Another issue with using the registry index page is that it actually makes finding some registries hard. Suppose, for example, I want to find the charset registry. I pull up the page and search for charset. There's only one match, and it isn't the charset registry: IANA Charset MIB RFC 3808 Now, if you happen to notice the line underneath, saying "See Character Sets", that might give you a clue what to search for. But that's easy to miss. Of coruse the issue in this case is the result of a longstanding error on the page which can (and should) be fixed. (We register charsets, not character sets; the two are not remotely synonymous.) But that's sort of the point: Arguing that an index page that's regularly edited by a bunch of different people and whose contents cannot be checked mechanically in any useful sense is going to be more stable than a bunch of URLs that are completely trivial to check mechanically doesn't come close to passing the laugh test.
(That being said, I wonder if some tool magic would display these references as pointers, just as already happens for normal references.)
This wierd resistance to including useful information in our documents may have made some small amount of sense in the past when things were less clear. It is completely silly and totally counterproductive now. Ned _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf