--On Monday, May 09, 2011 23:41 +0000 John Levine <johnl@xxxxxxxx> wrote: > In article <516EBEA6-E089-4952-AE33-DE799E37548A@xxxxxxxx> you > write: >> If only there were some uniform resource locator system, >> whereby we could use a string to both identify and locate >> such a document, and include such a string *in* our >> specifications. > > It exists, it's called a DOI. I don't understand them well > enough yet to have an opinion whether it would be worth the > hassle and possible cost of assigning DOIs to RFCs. But if > you look in Xplore and the ACM DL, just about everything has > one. John, Depends on where you look. DOIs are popular in some communities, URNs in others, and, of course, some communities have not discovered either. For most purposes, DOIs and URNs can be considered functionally equivalent, but one of the differences is that if we had to pay the usual fees for DOIs to assign them to RFCs, we might have to start charging for RFCs to cover those costs :-). For more on the URN approach to identifying articles, papers, and similar things, you might look in on what the URNBIS WG is doing and why. Mark's (slightly tongue in cheek, I think) suggestion of URLs actually doesn't work because they generally identify locations at which objects can be found, rather than the object itself (location-independent). But that is orthogonal to the question of preferences for DOIs versus URNs. john _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf