How to reference WHATWG Living Standards in RFCs / adding WHATWG specs to the IETF BibXML service

[tedharrison-rpc]

Hello, my name is Ted Harrison and I am the Citation Specialist for the RFC Production Center (RPC). We recently worked on a few Internet-Drafts in the process of becoming RFCs that reference WHATWG Living Standards. Since RFCs are immutable after publication, we want to insure that future readers of RFCs are given correct bibliographic information for WHATWG Living Standards and that we are providing useful references to these standards.

Currently, we use a reference template that looks something like this (using URL Pattern as an example):

[URL-PATTERN] WHATWG, "URL Pattern", WHATWG Living Standard, https://urlpattern.spec.whatwg.org/.
Commit snapshot: https://urlpattern.spec.whatwg.org/commit-snapshots/d13ebead18003059a83ca4a25240e5cafc066c4c/

This reference templates provides the readers with two URLs: 1) the "most recent version" of the Living Standard and 2) the "commit snapshot" URL of the Living Standard as it existed at the time of publication. We wanted to see if the working group has any thoughts, concerns, objections, etc. about this template.

Also, there a couple of things I've noticed in my research that would be helpful to clarify:

• Who should be listed as the author for a WHATWG Living Standard?

Authors of RFCs have listed "WHATWG" as the authoring organization. However, looking at other SDOs documents - for example, this W3C Recommendation's reference for HTML5 - it appears that there are also individual authors and/or editors for a Living Standard. Looking at the HTML Living Standard, it appears that author attribution is listed in the "Acknowledgements" section. Should the individuals listed in the Acknowledgements be listed as the authors? Or is listing "WHATWG" as the authoring organization acceptable?

• Is there a way for us to access a bibliographic database for WHATWG Living Standards?

We recently had a request to add WHATWG specifications to our citation library. This would allow RFC authors to automatically add references to WHATWG Living Standards to their drafts. Does WHATWG have any sort of database that we could use to help facilitate this?

Let me know if you need any clarification on any of this and thanks for your time!

Ted Harrison
RFC Production Center

[domenic]

Hi Ted, great to hear from you and thanks for reaching out.

We wanted to see if the working group has any thoughts, concerns, objections, etc. about this template.

Your current reference template seems good to me. I especially appreciate the centering of the living standard as primary. Since IETF specs cannot be updated after publication, linking to the commit snapshot seems like a reasonable idea, given the (hopefully very small) chance that the historical context might be important.

Who should be listed as the author for a WHATWG Living Standard?

I'd be curious to hear other author/editor opinions, but speaking for myself, I find crediting the organization to be reasonable. This fits well with the rolling nature of WHATWG standard editorship and authorship.

That said, most other organizations do include the authors in their citations of WHATWG standards, using the authors from the Acknowledgements section. (Or rather, using those in the database; see below.)

Is there a way for us to access a bibliographic database for WHATWG Living Standards?

The canonical database is at https://github.com/whatwg/sg/blob/main/db.json. This is in turn automatically injested into the larger database at https://www.specref.org/, which is what many other web specifications use. (See e.g. https://www.specref.org/?q=urlpattern.) Creating your own flow for injesting https://github.com/whatwg/sg/blob/main/db.json into the IETF database seems like a good idea to me. Let us know if we can help in some way.

[asimhusain-ai]

Hi Ted,

Thanks for reaching out and for being careful about how RFCs reference WHATWG Living Standards — we really appreciate that.

On your two main points:

1. Authorship
   It’s perfectly fine (and preferred) to list WHATWG as the authoring organization. The individuals mentioned in acknowledgements are contributors, but we don’t consider them the formal “authors” for citation purposes. Using “WHATWG” keeps things consistent across all our Living Standards.

2. Bibliographic Database
   At the moment, WHATWG doesn’t maintain a central bibliographic database in BibTeX/JSON/XML format. Each spec does have a stable URL, and each commit snapshot URL serves as a permanent reference point. For now, the approach you outlined — citing both the main Living Standard URL and the commit snapshot — is exactly what we’d recommend.

We can definitely see the value in a structured citation library and it’s something we may look into supporting in the future, but for now your template is the right way to go.