On 7/2/15 2:57 AM, Colin Perkins wrote: > Is having a DOI critical? No, obviously not, but it does help in some > cases, and does make some things easier. At negligible cost. I've taken to staying out of IETF bibliographic discussions because they tend to make me feel exceedingly peevish and I'd rather not feel exceedingly peevish. But, I read one piece of email in this thread and that led to another and then another, so here I am. The DOI is useful for cataloging because it introduces a structure that makes it easier to group things which are similar and to locate specific instances of those things within that group. So, I'm thinking about that in the context of the RFC series. Personally, I can't see that they're much use. To the extent that the assignment of a DOI might lead to us not using our own identifiers (eating our own dog food) that's potentially a problem. I don't see *much* harm here but I don't really see much practical benefit, either. Frankly, the whole thing reminds me of someone buying a GoPro, recording their commute to work, and never taking it out again. I haven't seen evidence that we've got a bibliographic problem here, and nothing (so far) in this discussion suggests that we do. But, we're going to do what we're going to do, so given that I'd suggest that John's concerns about format should be taken very seriously. Given that DOIs reflect, in some sense, the bibliographic structure of a group of documents, and given that we'd like to be adaptable to future changes to how we publish, using a flat namespace seems to be clearly the wrong thing to do and would seem to be a case where DOIs are considerably less useful than they might otherwise be. Melinda