At 6:15 PM -0400 8/27/03, Rosen, Brian wrote:
>I therefore have a modest proposal:
>
>Allow the submission of an xml file meeting the requirements of RFC2629
>along with the text file (and optional ps file) for an Internet Draft.
You didn't say what the additional value would be. We know the
additional value of a .ps file (drawings that don't translate to
ASCII art). What is the value of XML? It certainly isn't
searchability or readability.
On the contrary, having the base XML is a huge benefit for some searches I, and
I suspect many others, often do: I want to find what's changed from one version
to the next. All too often minor changes lead to large differences in formatted
output, and even the various tricky diff utilities don't always overcome this.
And if diffs of the base XML aren't to your taste, it would be easy to build a
tool that would perform the comparison and produce a modified XML document with
the changes highlighted. (Indeed, I'm sure utilities to do this already exist,
although how flexible they are in regards to different XML formats I couldn't
say.)
I'm sure there are also any number of other useful tricks that can be performed
if you have a number of Internet Drafts in a structured form. This is just the
one that interests me most initially.
As far as readability goes, having the base document gives me the ability to
generate whatever format I find most convenient to view documents. That's a big
readability boost in my book. In particular, generated HTML versions can
include useful hyperlinks.
Ned