On 17-jun-2006, at 0:18, Joe Touch wrote:
It's worth distinguishing the search for alternate normative output
formats from the search for a standard input format.
I think the mistake is to make the output format normative. If we
make the input format normative and publish that we're out of the
woods: obviously the input format is editable, and if it's
sufficiently (but not overly) well-defined output formats can be
generated as desired.
I'm very partial to xml2rfc,
I'm sorry to be so negative, but I hate it. The stupid thing can't
even handle my name properly so I have to live with what it does or
edit the result manually.
The problem with xml2rfc is that tries to be too smart by encoding
semantics. In theory this is the right thing to do, because you can
then do stuff like search for a specific author without catching
acknowledgment sections or find certain versions of the legalese. But
the problem is that this requires tools that either don't exist at
all, or aren't in wide use, so in practice it's actually harder to
work with the XML source than with the resulting draft/RFC format.
XML2RFC once made me miss a draft deadline by choking on some XML I
wrote without saying why or where, leaving me with an impossible
debugging task. Formatting drafts in vi may take longer on average
than working with xml2rfc but it's more deterministic.
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