Hi,
Randy Presuhn wrote:
Hi -
From: "Julian Reschke" <julian(_dot_)reschke(_at_)gmx(_dot_)de>
To: "Randy Presuhn" <randy_presuhn(_at_)mindspring(_dot_)com>
Cc: "IETF Discussion Mailing List" <ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org>
Sent: Wednesday, July 15, 2009 2:13 AM
Subject: Re: Automatically updated Table of Contents with Nroff
...
For editing a document, particularly a largish one, the availability of
.so is for me nroff's biggest advantage over xml2rfc.
...
How exactly is that an advantage of xml2rfc?
I meant "over xml2rfc"...
That's my point. It's a capability xml2rfc lacked, at least the last time
I used it. For the user to be able to split stuff up into multiple files
is a huge advantage which should be familiar to any programmer.
xml2rfc produces TOCs automatically, and in the right place.
Examples from my own experience: It's cleaner to be able to keep mib
modules in a separate files, rather than extracting it from a formatted
document. This is particularly true when there are multiple MIB modules
And of course you can do that with xml2rfc as well; just automate the
process of converting the source file to something that can be included
into the XML source using the standard XML include mechanisms.
in a document. Common references (especially for a bundle of inter-related
I-Ds, but also for RFCs) can be handled as macros that result in mnemonic
values showing up both in the source and in the generated output. This
is especially useful when one RFC is replaced with another: one little
edit to the file of reference macros, rather than going through the whole
bundle of source files. Finally, it is a much cleaner way to handle
boilerplate,
particularly if you want to use configuration management software for
your sources and have a "paper trail" of boilerplate changes.
You can do that in XML as well; just define them as entities and put
them into a file you include as external reference.
Now, it is true the RFC editor wanted nroff sources in the form of a single
file. Fortunately, this is trivial to produce at publication time using soelim
or equivalent.
But then, TOC generation will not work anymore as expected, right?
Point is: nroff and xml2rfc share the advantage that they are simple
text based formats, which can be put under version control, and
collaborative editing/change control just works. Missing features can
simply implemented using automated pre- or post-processing stages.
BR, Julian
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