Subject: [rfc-i] date-less citations

From: Julian Reschke <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 14 May 2017 10:51:15 +0200

Hi there,

is there an agreement about how to reference things that have no 
publiccation date (for whatever reason)?

xml2rfc doesn't allow skipping <date>, but it does allow leaving out all 
attributes, and this generates a date-less reference entry.

However, recently, I have seen many documents saying "n.d.", which I 
believe originates from the use of kramdown-rfc2629 (abusing the date 
element, FWIW).

Any opinions about what is the better choice?

Best regards, Julian
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From: Carsten Bormann <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 14 May 2017 23:40:27 +0200

> is there an agreement about how to reference things that have no publiccation date (for whatever reason)?

There are two main reasons:

— the date is not given on the document (because the author didn’t think this was an archival document, forgot to date, …).
- there was no publication date in that sense (e.g., for a web page that is continually being updated)

For the first, I like to have some indication of “no date” (and we can discuss whether “n.d.” is Latin enough here :-).
For the second case, the date-less reference may make most sense:

> xml2rfc doesn't allow skipping <date>, but it does allow leaving out all attributes, and this generates a date-less reference entry.
> 
> However, recently, I have seen many documents saying "n.d.", which I believe originates from the use of kramdown-rfc2629 (abusing the date element, FWIW).

I don’t see n.d. as an abuse at all (RFC 7749, 2.13):

   In the case of bibliographic references, the date information can
   have prose text for the month or year.

The default in kramdown-rfc is “n.d.” if the date: member of the yaml is not given or null.
(This is the default so the proofreader is reminded to do something about missing dates.)
You can set the date explicitly to false to get a date-less reference.
(Kramdown-rfc tries to parse any string given for date: as a date; the hack to suppress this is to put it inside an array.)

Grüße, Carsten

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From: Julian Reschke <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 15 May 2017 06:37:35 +0200

>    have prose text for the month or year.

But "no date" or "n.d." is not a date, not even in prose.

 > ...

Thanks, do you have an example for that?

Best regards, Julian

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From: Carsten Bormann <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 15 May 2017 07:12:10 +0200

> On May 15, 2017, at 06:37, Julian Reschke <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 

No, but it is “date information”.

> Thanks, do you have an example for that?

Sure:

  netconfcentral:
    title: 'NETCONF Central: library of YANG modules'
    author:
    - org: YUMAworks
    date: false
    seriesinfo:
      Web: http://www.netconfcentral.org/modulelist

(Sorry about the seriesinfo — this was the way it was done in the XML from which this was automatically translated to markdown.)

Grüße, Carsten

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From: "Heather Flanagan (RFC Series Editor)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 15 May 2017 06:23:13 -0700

> Any opinions about what is the better choice?

Hi Julian,

I believe you're seeing the n.d. in the XML itself, yes? The RPC has
been removing it before publication; we prefer the date-less entry when
no date appears on the material itself.

-Heather

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From: Carsten Bormann <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 15 May 2017 16:04:38 +0200

> no date appears on the material itself.

Ah, that’s great:

I get to see all those n.d.s at the Internet-draft stage, alerting me as a reviewer when people have been sloppy putting in the date, and the final RFC doesn’t have any remaining n.d.s that would actually indicate an unknown date.  Best of both worlds.

Grüße, Carsten

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From: Paul Kyzivat <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 14 May 2017 19:08:34 -0400

> For the second case, the date-less reference may make most sense:

The second case is problematic. In that case the reference isn't stable. 
IMO it shouldn't be treated as a *reference* at all. (It *definitely* 
shouldn't be a normative reference.)

	Thanks,
	Paul

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From: Carsten Bormann <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 15 May 2017 17:22:06 +0200

(Actually, references to open source projects and other moving targets is one interesting issue that we are having. So I'm not sure that sentence, which probably was a desirable rule a decade or two ago, should stay true...)

Sent from mobile

> On 15. May 2017, at 01:08, Paul Kyzivat <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
> The second case is problematic. In that case the reference isn't stable. IMO it shouldn't be treated as a *reference* at all. (It *definitely* shouldn't be a normative reference.)
> 
>    Thanks,
>    Paul
>

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From: "Joel M. Halpern" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 15 May 2017 11:37:53 -0400

While I can not speak for the otehrs involved in the conversation about 
references to open source, the general tone of the discussion has been 
that normative references still have to be to a stable referent.

Yours,
Joel

On 5/15/17 11:22 AM, Carsten Bormann wrote:
> (Actually, references to open source projects and other moving targets
> is one interesting issue that we are having. So I'm not sure that
> sentence, which probably was a desirable rule a decade or two ago,
> should stay true...)
>
> Sent from mobile
>
> On 15. May 2017, at 01:08, Paul Kyzivat <[email-masked]
> <mailto:[email-masked]>> wrote:
>
>>> — the date is not given on the document (because the author didn’t
>>> think this was an archival document, forgot to date, …).
>>> For the first, I like to have some indication of “no date” (and we
>>> can discuss whether “n.d.” is Latin enough here :-).
>> The second case is problematic. In that case the reference isn't
>> stable. IMO it shouldn't be treated as a *reference* at all. (It
>> *definitely* shouldn't be a normative reference.)
>>
>>    Thanks,
>>    Paul
>>
>> [email-masked] <mailto:[email-masked]>

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From: Paul Kyzivat <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 15 May 2017 14:31:38 -0400

> that normative references still have to be to a stable referent.

Yes. Perhaps the rule can be different for informative references. But 
even then, if you are referring to a source that you claim has some 
position about some topic, then if the reference isn't stable you have 
no reason to believe that the reader will find any such thing.

It might make sense to say "The web site at http:foo.bar/baz is a place 
where code on this subject may be found." But given the life cycle of 
open source projects even that may be dicy. At least that is a different 
sort of reference than either normative or informative references.

	Thanks,
	Paul

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From: Adam Roach <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 15 May 2017 14:49:38 -0500

> no reason to believe that the reader will find any such thing.

To be fair, though, we allow informative citations to internet drafts 
(as "work in progress," naturally), which have no guarantee of being 
eventually published. They could expire or change substantially.

/a

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From: Julian Reschke <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 15 May 2017 21:57:43 +0200

> eventually published. They could expire or change substantially.

Specific versions of Internet Drafts are stable...