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.
I was ignoring it and hoping it went away. ;-)
I started off using the MS Word template and CRLF to output txt documents.
I found this to be a PITA. About 9 months ago I switched to xml2rfc and
found it to be great. Yes, it had a learning curve and the error messages
could be better, but the learning curve is not terrible IMHO and you
eventually get to figure out what the errors mean after awhile. My
productivity gains in writing and editing drafts is much higher than with MS
Word, though I miss some of Word's built-in change acceptance/rejection
functionality (doing an xml diff is fine, just different).
I also love being able to define both external links and internal anchors so
easily. Just the internal reference linking has saved me time in post
version -00 docs when I move sections or sentences around and needn't worry
about keeping track of what section was what number. And it is also nice to
be able to share an HTML version of the doc with co-authors and reviewers,
rather than a txt doc with no working links.
I happen to use Coda on the Mac and use it to write HTML and other scripting
stuff. YMMV.
No, it's not. The problem with XML2RFC formatted drafts and RFCs is
that you can't display them reasonably without using XML2RFC, and
although XML2RFC can run on many systems in theory, in practice it's
very difficult to install and run successfully because it's written in
TCL and many XML2RFC files depend on the local availability of
references. When those aren't present the conversion fails.
How frequently do any of us work when we're not connected to the Internet?
I just have my XML editor open in one window and the web-based xml2rfc tool
in the other, and every time I make a significant change, I just re-run it
to display an HTML version of the document. This tends to also make
error-investigation easier since I know what I just changed and can then
review a specific section to find my error.
those tools. So I write my XML2RFC source by hand. The result is that
I invariably get error messages that the <section> and </section> tags
don't match properly. This is a problem that is extremely hard to
debug manually, especially as just grepping for "section" isn't
enough: there could be a <!--, -->, </middle> etc somewhere between a
<section> and </section> that breaks everything.
This is most likely a nested section tag problem. When you write your XML
do you have every "flat" and justified left? If so, I'd recommend you
tab-in sections and keep your open and close tags lined up, as well as any
tags within each section tabbed in further.
What we need is the ability to write drafts with a standard issue word
processor.
You mean like the template and directions available for MS Word? Why not
just use that?
Jason
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