Talk:Media-independent interface

Proper noun?

Tony1 has moved the article and made other capitalization changes which seem to indicate that the Media Independent Interface and variants are not proper nouns. The fact that the article starts "The media-independent interface..." is a good tip off that we are dealing with a proper noun and should consider reverting these changes. I often get this wrong so am opening discussion rather than reverting myself. --Kvng (talk) 14:09, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

Thanks, Kvng. If you know better, please do revert. Let me ask someone else in the meantime, though. (I don't think the use of "the" necessarily indicates a proper name ... we have "The X rule", "The Y hypothesis". Let us see. It's not my area, this article, I should concede. Tony (talk) 14:19, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

Looking at books, I think Tony got it right. There are certainly plenty of reliable sources that do NOT treat it a proper name, and do include the clarifying hyphen, like [1]. And many of the ones that capitalize it appear to be doing so in support of the acronym definition, as in "Media Indepedent Interface (MII)", which is a not unusual use for caps, but not one that imply they're thinking of it as a proper name. Most capitalized appearances in books are actually in longer more specific terms, such as "Gigabit Media Independent Interface (GMII)", which are not relevant here but confuse the count. This one and this one have it both ways and specifically support it being NOT a proper, even when limited to the 100 Mb Ethernet version. Per MOS:CAPS, then with sources indicating caps are not necessary, we prefer lowercase. Dicklyon (talk) 15:12, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

Also note the section heading "Standard MII" which specializes the more generic topic to a standard. Dicklyon (talk) 15:44, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

After thinking about it for a while, media-independent interface seems to be more of a concept, used in many products and by numerous manufacturers, rather than a specific entity we can point a finger at and say "that's it". Thus, it probably shouldn't be treated as a proper noun. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 18:20, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

However, Ethernet, Fast Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet, etc. are proper nouns – they stand for the specific network interface and its different versions, which are backed by distinct standards. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 11:46, 1 April 2015 (UTC)

Dsimic, thanks for that. I'd been meaning to ask someone about that cluster of items. Tony (talk) 03:56, 3 April 2015 (UTC)

You're welcome. It's just weird to see "ethernet" or "fast ethernet" in lowercase. :) — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 17:06, 3 April 2015 (UTC)

See Talk:100_Gigabit_Ethernet#Wots_in_a_name for further discussion of Ethernet naming conventions. ~Kvng (talk) 22:15, 3 April 2015 (UTC)

@Tony1: I agree that The... is not a definitive indication of proper noun. --Kvng (talk) 16:53, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

@Dicklyon: I see the MII as a the specific interface between Ethernet MAC and PHY. It is like a protocol and we have judged most protocols to be proper nouns. Also have a look at Parallel ATA, SCSI and MIDI which are hardware interfaces that seem to be similar to MII and have been deemed proper nouns. --Kvng (talk) 16:53, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

Yes, I do understand that logic. Yet the article talks about it more generically, as do many sources, in distinguishing the "Standard MII" from "a" or "the" media-independent interface more generically. As Dsimic says, it's "more of a concept", which also got applied to name a standard, whereas SCSI, MIDI, ATA are never used generically (I think). Dicklyon (talk) 22:51, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

OK. Doesn't look like we have any kind of consensus here so we'll leave it as it is for now. --Kvng (talk) 23:08, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

RMII signal levels

Is there a good reason for the list of Chips and different voltage levels in paragraph 1 (mostly national chips)?

Is the mentioning of the national guidelines necessary?

The last paragraph reads like a little commercial for another national (again). Is the information contained in this paragraph needed? I think not really.

--Markus-- — Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.167.137.205 (talk) 06:00, 19 October 2015 (UTC)

Section link rot

Many of the redirects to this article have broken section links. I recently added mention of all these variants in the lead and the article is not huge so I thought it reasonable that all these redirects deliver readers to the top of the article (which is what happens in the case of a broken section link). ~Kvng (talk) 14:09, 24 September 2016 (UTC)

Just to add to that, the RMII and RGMII links at the bottom are no longer there on the HP website. They did not appear to be there in the HPE website either - don't know where to find those docs. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 134.134.137.75 (talk) 17:25, 18 October 2016 (UTC)

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Citation request for "The receive clock signal is always provided by the PHY on the RXC line."

I don't see the necessity for a specific citation here. RXC is listed in the signal table directly below and that info is taken directly from the specs. --Zac67 (talk) 15:45, 16 August 2020 (UTC)

The text now matches the table. Are we sure the table is right? At the physical layer, Gigabit Ethernet selects a clock master for the link and receive and transmit operate on the same clock. How do we have separate clocks for RX and TX in the GMII? ~Kvng (talk) 15:28, 19 August 2020 (UTC)

The table is directly from the HPE specs. You'd probably have to ask the same question for the IEEE GMII as well - their specs are more specific and the RGMII likely modeled in the same way. I guess the master/slave clock direction is embedded in the PHY, so RXC is always from the PHY, but TXC should be from MAC for the master and from PHY for the slave. I'll look it up but need to find the time. --Zac67 (talk) 18:22, 20 August 2020 (UTC)