Subject: RFC and I-D Citation Tool

From: Ole Jacobsen <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 31 Jul 2012 11:16:33 -0700 (PDT)

In The Internet Protocol Journal I have been using the following 
citation format, best illustrated by an example:

 Julien Meuric, Diego Caviglia, Don Fedyk, Attila Takacs, and Lou 
 Berger, "GMPLS Asymmetric Bandwidth Bidirectional Label Switched 
 Paths (LSPs)," RFC 6387, September 2011.

So, that's full author names "and" before the last author name, title, 
document number and date, using the American "quotation outside 
punctuation rule."

I got tired of doing this "by hand" so I asked Henrik if he could 
write me a tool. He did (THANKS!), and the result is here:

http://tools.ietf.org/tools/citation/

This will take either the draft name or the RFC number as input and 
produce a citation similar to the one above. You can of course play 
with the elements and generate a format that suits your own taste, for 
example, for I-Ds, in print it might be good to have the FILE NAME as 
the last entry:

 Adam Langley, "Serializing DNS Records with DNSSEC Authentication," 
 Internet Draft, work in progress, July 2011,
 draft-agl-dane-serializechain-01

...since I like having filenames or URLs on one line (not wrapping)
as much as possible.

Many thanks again to Henrik, and I hope you will find it useful too!

Ole

Ole J. Jacobsen
Editor and Publisher,  The Internet Protocol Journal
Cisco Systems
Tel: +1 408-527-8972   Mobile: +1 415-370-4628
E-mail: [email-masked]  URL: http://www.cisco.com/ipj
Skype: organdemo

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From: Marc Blanchet <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 31 Jul 2012 11:17:42 -0700

cool!!!  I will also be using this! thanks!

Marc.

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From: "Eggert, Lars" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 31 Jul 2012 18:28:21 +0000

And for those of us who write academic papers, there is of course Roland's and Miguel's BibTex collections:

http://tm.uka.de/~bless/bibrfcindex.html
https://sites.google.com/site/ea1dof/bibtex

Lars

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From: "Ersue, Mehmet (NSN - DE/Munich)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 31 Jul 2012 22:27:27 +0200

Nice tool. 

However, I am wondering why the tool changes the order of the names.
There is actually a reason why documents list names in a specific order.

Some of the citations appear to be incomplete, see RFC3410.

Cheers, 
Mehmet 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]] On Behalf
Of ext Ole
> Jacobsen
> Sent: Tuesday, July 31, 2012 11:17 AM
> To: The IETF
> Cc: RSOC; Heather Flanagan; [email-masked]
> Subject: RFC and I-D Citation Tool
> 
>

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From: Ole Jacobsen <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 31 Jul 2012 14:23:01 -0700 (PDT)

Mehmet,

The tool is not INTENDED to change the author order. A somewhat 
incomplete database can indeed lead to unexpected results, use with 
caution.

Ole

Ole J. Jacobsen

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From: Steven Bellovin <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 31 Jul 2012 14:35:21 -0700

There are a number of very weird entries that require special handling.  I (also) wrote a Python script to convert the XML file to bibtex and had to deal with a number of these special cases.  For example, RFC 4534 lists the authors as "A Colegrove, H Harney" instead of "A. Colegrove, H. Harney".  Other names like "The Internet Society" require special handling.  And I completely punted on proper capitalization of the titles; I just accept what's there.

>>> E-mail: [email-masked]  URL: http://www.cisco.com/ipj

		--Steve Bellovin, https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb

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From: Carsten Bormann <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 31 Jul 2012 14:50:14 -0700

Not yet quite optimal for e.g. RFC 3095:

http://tools.ietf.org/tools/citation/?doc=3095&template=%7Bauthors.andlist%7D%2C+%22%7Bdoctitle%7D%2C%22+%7Bdocname%7D%2C+%7Bdate%3A%25B+%25Y.%7D&submit=Generate+citation

Grüße, Carsten

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From: Henrik Levkowetz <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 31 Jul 2012 15:55:13 -0700

Hi Ersue,

> There is actually a reason why documents list names in a specific order.

There is no intentional name re-ordering.  I'll look into why that happens.

> Some of the citations appear to be incomplete, see RFC3410.

Ok, will check that too.

Thanks for the feedback!

Best regards,

	Henrik

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From: Henrik Levkowetz <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 31 Jul 2012 15:58:09 -0700

On 2012-07-31 14:35 Steven Bellovin said the following:
> There are a number of very weird entries that require special
> handling. I (also) wrote a Python script to convert the XML file to
> bibtex and had to deal with a number of these special cases. For
> example, RFC 4534 lists the authors as "A Colegrove, H Harney"
> instead of "A. Colegrove, H. Harney". Other names like "The Internet
> Society" require special handling. And I completely punted on proper
> capitalization of the titles; I just accept what's there.

Ah.  I'll have to look at fixing cases like the ones you mention, then.

Thanks!

	Henrik

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From: Ole Jacobsen <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 31 Jul 2012 16:17:45 -0700 (PDT)

One feature request that I discussed with Henrik was to either
"auto-detect" I-D file names and handle them slightly differently
from RFC numbers (by putting the file name as the final entry)
OR just having two tools. With the kind of feedback Henrik is
getting I am sure the tool will be improved/enhanced over time.

Ole

Ole J. Jacobsen

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From: Henrik Levkowetz <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 31 Jul 2012 18:29:06 -0700

Hi Ole,

> getting I am sure the tool will be improved/enhanced over time.

I'm thinking about how to do this best now.  One option I'm considering
is to provide two template fields in the tool, one to be used for
references to RFCs, the other to references to drafts.

Best regards,

	Henrik