Re: Alternative formats for IDs

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Joe Touch wrote:

> 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

Authors could create their own input format, transformed into
the 2629bis XML by a script.  Something like "Wiki" would be
far more than good enough, and that's not very tedious.

An XML editor not knowing the latest and greatest DTD would
still guarantee proper nesting of tags.  And if authors use
US ASCII as document charset their worst problem would be to
convince their XML editor that symbolic entities like &nbhy;
are no nonsense, but defined in the xml2rfc DTD.

If authors use UTF-8 (or anything else that's not ASCII) they
deserve to be in serious trouble for the resulting text/plain
output, that's a point for the I18N considerations in a future
2629bis 

> AFAICT, Word uses its own DTD, and isn't particularly
> cooperative with using your own

Maybe Word isn't an ideal XML-editor then.  Any decent text
editor will do.  If authors don't like vi or notepad they use
something else.  My favourite text editor is based on XEDIT,
about 23 years old.

>> 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

That list is not complete, e.g. you forgot to mention ABNF.
Another point are the keywords for many RfCs, example:

http://purl.net/net/rfc/2070
http://tools.ietf.org/html/2070

The latter tool doesn't "see" some meta-data like keywords,
because it's not part of the ASCII version.  But it's simple
to specify meta-data in an XML version.

                           Bye, Frank



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