Melinda Shore writes:
On Thursday, September 4, 2003, at 12:59 PM, Michael Thomas wrote:
Er, if you're going to do that, why don't you just
accept any source format
It depends what problem you're trying to solve. I really dislike the
use of XML for representing protocol elements and I still use nroff and
troff for producing most of my documents (not just internet drafts), but
I can see where including XML marked-up documents in the repository
would be a win *for archival purposes*. How working groups want to
handle making document source available is a related but substantially
different matter.
I haven't been paying to much attention to this
thread, but my underinformed take was that there
were two largish things:
1) Source availability
2) Better cross referencing
For (1), just being agnostic and telling people to
just deal with whatever source format the author
(or wg) decided they felt most comfortable editing
in gets you most of the way toward the XML goal
without having to deal the religion problem. I
don't think it's unreasonable to put the onus on
the people who want source to deal with what the
author wanted to use. The original editor's life
(or lack thereof) seems more important, IMO.
For (2), somebody has graciously pointed out that
draft/rfc->html mungers already exist.
So as a more modest proposal:
On the drafts and RFC's repository have two new
options:
1) Source in whatever format it came in
2) The .txt sent through the .html grinder
Mike