My apologies for the subject line. I'm very disappointed that the silent
majority of draft authors isn't speaking up. I can't imagine that the
vast majority of draft authors has absolutely no problems with XML2RFC.
So I'm assuming they've been ignoring the thread, hopefully the new
subject line will get some of them to chime in. If that doesn't happen
I'll shut up and try to figure out why I have so much trouble with
something that nobody else finds difficult.
I don't mind the XML part of writing the drafts, it's just annoying that
so few DTDs are available to edit the things. There are a ton of
commercial XML editors out there--Word, Dreamweaver, and many others.
That's actually part of the problem - there are so many XML-capable
tools that providing directions for even a reasonable subset would be
very challenging.
But, not being an XML expert, I don't know how to get a DTD to work in
any of these software packages, so editing the XML side is a matter of
hand coding it. <blech>
I'm a little unclear on how configuring an XML editor to know about a DTD, or
Schema, or Relax grammar is a matter of having sufficient XML expertise. It's
mostly a matter of knowing how to use your tools. If this is truly hard to do
it's a problem with the documentation for whatever tool you're using.
FWIW, in many cases it's simply a mattter of parking the DTD or Schema in the
same directory where your XML sources are.
I use four different XML-aware editors, two of them - BBEdit and Exchanger -
quite regularly, and I've had no real problems getting this set up. The (free)
BBedit XML validation plugin is a little annoying in that it puts the material
to validate in a temporary file before invoking the validator, meaning the
coresident file trick doesn't work. But a simple google search turns up a
reasonable solution - use a URL with an explicit path in the DOCTYPE
declaration.
Exchanger handles this especially well, I think. Most of the time it finds the
DTD without any trouble, but when it can't it simply prompts for the location,
and remembers it after that. It also supports specifying the location in the
source file if that's more to your taste.
I think a lot of the problem is the issues with editing these things. If
we had a DTD that worked in other pieces of software, it could be
converted using commonly available software into text formats. The
problem, from my perspective, isn't the format, it's the lack of tools
to work in that format, at this point.
I've had no trouble using either the DTD or the Relax grammar that comes with
the xml2rfc distro.
Ned
_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
Ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf