From @lbartholomew-rpc (who represents the RFC Production Center):
Sorry I wasn't clearer about this! Ronald, your "We return them without the dots" note demonstrates the issue with "Lang, J P." in the listing for RFC 4872. Because entries for initials are being returned without the dots, they don't display correctly in output for multiple initials that should have dots instead of a space between them (in other words, "J P." should be "J.P.").
There is some variation, and some authors have explicitly expressed their preferences. For example, Simon Pietro Romano as of a few years ago wants S P. Romano on the first page (note the space between "S" and "P.". However, we need to keep S. Romano for RFCs 1020, 1062, 1117, and 6503 (and per rfc-index.xml) but use S P. Romano for RFCs 6504, 7058, 8846, and 8847. So if the rfc-index.xml entries are pulled for each individual RFC, things should work fine. I don't know how you extract the data, so I'm guessing and hoping that it's not a hassle.
As described in: https://github.com/ietf-ribose/bibxml-service/issues/238#issuecomment-1192871487
From @lbartholomew-rpc (who represents the RFC Production Center):
Specifically, https://github.com/ietf-tools/relaton-data-rfcs/blob/4e97527a6364853c3208d5ef10be62393cc8f969/data/RFC4872.yaml#L26-L50
Originated from
rfc-index.xml
:In the initials, we need to keep the original formatting since it is a sensitive topic as described by @lbartholomew-rpc.
We must add specs to test this for correctness and link to the IETF RPC requirement.