Sorry for a late followup here...
Sorry to sound annoyed ... there's been quite a bit of xml2rfc bashing,
and much of it has been sadly misinformed. First, this has always been
a non-sanctioned, non-approved, volunteer effort. Volunteer 1 was /mtr,
but quite a few others joined in. And, as was previously said, the
main reason this tool was built was to make our own lives much easier.
That said, there has always been a desire to get this stuff to enter the
mainstream, and because of that a whole bunch of little tweaks have been
entered based on user needs or perceived needs and a fairly robust
infrastructure is in place to support authors (e.g., a citation database,
a mailing list, interoperable implementations).
I just finished and submitted Yet Another Draft Using XML2RFC, and wanted to
respond to Carl's note.
Thank you, to the xml2rfc volunteers, for providing a clunky yet usable
tool, that works well enough for me to revise a draft, starting on Tuesday,
and submit it this afternoon, with somewhat dodgey Internet connectivity,
with confidence that I have current boilerplate, etc.
It's not everything I would want - actually, the suggestion I saw this week
to generate HTML and paste it into Word for spelling/grammar checking helped
a lot! - but it works well enough that I haven't even bothered installing an
XML editor locally.
I'm an XML2RFC outsider, but when I've been subscribed to the mailing list,
I saw what Carl was describing - a really helpful community that doesn't
want to make random changes, but DOES want to make changes that actually
improve the tool and its usability. Maybe it would be worth having an
XML2RFC Bar BOF in Montreal, just to say "thank you" with beer.
And, while I'm typing - thank you to the Tools group, for providing entirely
usable IDnits checking (which I would need more, if XML2RFC wasn't so
careful) and especially for providing very helpful ID-diff capability, which
was very helpful because I was revising text with a co-author twelve time
zones away, who is just too darned busy to try to figure out what I changed,
and I feel a lot better being able to say "and here's the diffs".
Thanks,
Spencer Dawkins
p.s. If you happen to think that helping Spencer generate more drafts is NOT
a good thing - well, don't blame the XML2RFC guys! Maybe if there was an
output option called "Consistent and Logically Correct TXT"... perhaps I
should suggest that at the Bar BOF? There may be interest from others :-)
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