Properly citing RFCs and I-Ds

Today, an Internet-Draft (I-D) was posted with the goal to clarify how to cite Requests for Comments (RFCs). The suggested BiBTeX format is relatively close to what I happen to use for about 15 years. But the final word, of course, has not been spoken about this and there are some interesting questions one can ask. For example, since RFCs fail to represent author names properly (unless your parents were wise enough to give you a name that is 7-bit US ASCII compatible), the question arises whether a citation in publications that do allow the proper representation of names (almost all journals and conferences) MAY use a person’s native spelling of his name or whether one MUST use the spelling in the published RFC.

A transition of the RFC format from 7-bit US ASCII to UTF-8 might be a solution to this problem (for all future RFCs), but then this might take even longer than the adoption of IPv6. ;-)