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Ted Faber wrote:
On Thu, Jan 12, 2006 at 04:22:53PM -0800, Dave Crocker wrote:
Maintaining xml2rfc is going to far less fragile than maintaining nroff.
Nroff has no current industry penetration. XML has quite a lot.
I'd be cautious here.
Equating the XML communities and the xml2rfc communities is not correct.
There's an important distinction between the XML meta-language and the
xml2rfc language and its associated formatting tools. Lots of places
express languages in XML DTDs and use one of the many XML parsers in
their tools to parse those DTDs. That widespread adoption of the
meta-language and the resultant support for XML parsing libraries in a
large number of implementation languages and environments does simplify
the specification of the xml2rfc language and the generation and
maintenance of the xml2rfc program. However, the actual community of
that uses the XML-based RFC authoring tools is a subset of the
contributors to the IETF; the maintainers of the xml2rfc formatter(s)
are a subset of that. That smaller community is the one that is needed
to keep a working xml2rfc language and formatting program available to
the IETF.
It's by no means obvious to me that xml2rfc has reached a critical mass
of developers and users, nor that it will necessarily do so organically.
This is my impression, from trying to use it as well. I was troubled by
'yet another embedded text system' that necessitated editing source,
which seemed like a stone-age throwback when I abandoned such systems in
the mid 1980s (Scribe, nroff, etc. at the time).
While I appreciate that, in theory:
1. there are WYSIWYG XML editors that *can* be loaded with DTDs
2. Word et al. are moving to XML
it's worth noting that:
(1) requires users to enter data into XML fields, which can
be very tedious. it also assumes that the XML editor can be
loaded with the current IETF RFC DTD, which is by no means
guaranteed or easy
(2) AFAICT, Word uses its own DTD, and isn't particularly
cooperative with using your own (I've asked others on the tools
list about this, and they have had similar experience)
...
All that said, I do think that an XML-based encoding of RFC contents is
a good idea
I do not; there is very little in RFCs that needs to be tagged except:
MIBs
lists of authors
lists of references
I can't see why pushing the whole document into 'yet another tagged data
format' does anything for the utility of the remainder.
Joe
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