author required for references but not enforced by kramdown

[vttale]

This might ultimately not be a problem with kramdown, but I don't know the underlying citation policy that is relevant.

I had a document that had normative and informative references in my .md that only had title and target associated, which ultimately led to a very obscure and somewhat misleading exception from xml2rfc on the .xml to .html conversion, although not on .txt. Adding an author that included either name or organization obviated the exception so the .html could be produced.

I'll be filing a ticket against xml2rfc about that too, but raise the issue here because if the format of Internet-Draft references requires that an author be present, then kramdown should reject the input when it's absent. If the citation format does not require its presence then this ticket can just be closed and it is entirely xml2rfc's problem.

[cabo]

Hmm, I'm a bit weary of including too much detailed knowledge about xml2rfc in kramdown-rfc, as xml2rfc is changing a lot. However, both RFC7749 and RFC7991 do require at least one author (which may include a name and/or an organization), so I'll keep this issue open until I have developed a better policy for warning about (or not at all) generating invalid XML. (One approach might be to fill in one surrogate author automatically from kramdown-rfc.)