What if you are reading on a copied / cached / reformatted version of the spec?

I'm not sure I quite understand the question?

I expect this would go in the next draft of the spec (if agreed upon), since 2019-09 is already released, and not actually have the IDs in this PR - I would have PR'd on a branch for the next draft if I saw one.

@notEthan there's no branch, we do the regular work on master, and branch for things like meta-schema bugfixes. As you noted, there's no way to update a published RFC anyway, so there's no point in a branch on that.

This is a reasonable idea. @philsturgeon @gregsdennis as people working on tools supporting this, what do you think of this one? Also paging @Relequestual on general principle.

Agreed. I'll leave others to comment. This sounds reasonable.

I don't think this change would affect any tools. it should only affect how the spec appears to humans reading it - whether the URI is linked or not.

Note that we do plan to eventually have files here, and could backport them to older drafts, so that is actually a fairly strong reason to leave them as links. You can't go back and change them once published, so a backport would only work if they were published as links.

On the other hand, you could still copy-paste them, I suppose, but it's less obvious.