-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Ted Faber wrote: > On Thu, Jan 12, 2006 at 04:22:53PM -0800, Dave Crocker wrote: > >>Maintaining xml2rfc is going to far less fragile than maintaining nroff. >>Nroff has no current industry penetration. XML has quite a lot. > > > I'd be cautious here. > > Equating the XML communities and the xml2rfc communities is not correct. > > There's an important distinction between the XML meta-language and the > xml2rfc language and its associated formatting tools. Lots of places > express languages in XML DTDs and use one of the many XML parsers in > their tools to parse those DTDs. That widespread adoption of the > meta-language and the resultant support for XML parsing libraries in a > large number of implementation languages and environments does simplify > the specification of the xml2rfc language and the generation and > maintenance of the xml2rfc program. However, the actual community of > that uses the XML-based RFC authoring tools is a subset of the > contributors to the IETF; the maintainers of the xml2rfc formatter(s) > are a subset of that. That smaller community is the one that is needed > to keep a working xml2rfc language and formatting program available to > the IETF. > > It's by no means obvious to me that xml2rfc has reached a critical mass > of developers and users, nor that it will necessarily do so organically. This is my impression, from trying to use it as well. I was troubled by 'yet another embedded text system' that necessitated editing source, which seemed like a stone-age throwback when I abandoned such systems in the mid 1980s (Scribe, nroff, etc. at the time). While I appreciate that, in theory: 1. there are WYSIWYG XML editors that *can* be loaded with DTDs 2. Word et al. are moving to XML it's worth noting that: (1) requires users to enter data into XML fields, which can be very tedious. it also assumes that the XML editor can be loaded with the current IETF RFC DTD, which is by no means guaranteed or easy (2) AFAICT, Word uses its own DTD, and isn't particularly cooperative with using your own (I've asked others on the tools list about this, and they have had similar experience) ... > All that said, I do think that an XML-based encoding of RFC contents is > a good idea I do not; there is very little in RFCs that needs to be tagged except: MIBs lists of authors lists of references I can't see why pushing the whole document into 'yet another tagged data format' does anything for the utility of the remainder. Joe -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (MingW32) Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFDyAMoE5f5cImnZrsRAjRYAKCjPWwgFL5CvOksicDDWC3RRMrKPACg2+Sm +PyT8AAXATtZN3fps0K9ezI= =rR0F -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf