Re: spec gen tools, was: Automatically updated Table of Contents with Nroff

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

 



My personal preference would be for Google docs to change their HTML generator so that it preserves the structure of the layout (H1, H2 etc) rather than just the presentation.

That way we could have multiple people edit the same doc without having to swap files about in email.

As a document format, the XML2RFC format is terrible. It uses all the abominable features of SGML. Rather disappointingly for a format intended for use by a standards organization it is different to HTML in ways that serve no purpose other than to prevent the use of widely available tools.


One improvement that we could realize with little effort would be to simply replace the individual entity declaration files for the RFC references with one great big honking file containing all of them. That way it would only be necessary to maintain citations in two places rather than three as at present.

It would be much better if the references could be generated automatically though.


On Thu, Dec 30, 2010 at 9:58 AM, Julian Reschke <julian.reschke@xxxxxx> wrote:
On 30.12.2010 10:50, Carsten Bormann wrote:
But while we're at the topic of *running* xml2rfc: I always advise people to run it locally;

One problem is that the "default" way of doing references in RFC 2629 XML appears to perform an online fetch of the reference information for each build, with no caching whatsoever.  If you do have to look at the ASCII (yes, sometimes tables etc. need some tweaking), this is a pain.

Yes, that's why I always recommend not to use that style.


(My markdown-to-RFC2629 workflow does some caching here, but life becomes painful again when interacting with XML-only co-authors.)

BTW, if you are on a Mac, get one of the package managers "macports" or "homebrew", and do

       port install xml2rfc

or

       brew install xml2rfc

Interesting. Does this get you a current version, though?


Finally, don't run xml2rfc until you need to; to preview while editing, just use the XSLT and open the XML file in a web browser.

Indeed -- thanks Julian for this wonderful tool.
Get it from<http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/rfc2629xslt.zip>.
Just put the line

  <?xml-stylesheet type='text/xsl' href="" ?>

as the second line of the xml, and open the xml in a browser.
(The only caveat I'm aware of is that you cannot really use the ugly vspace-999 hack for page break tweaks any more.  Good riddance.  Switch to the needLines PI.  That one appears to be acting a bit strange in xml2rfc, though.  It usually works for me with<?rfc needLines="30"?>.)

If you educate me what it's supposed to do (force a page break?), I can look into adding it to the XSLT (it would only have an effect for print preview, but I assume that would be ok?).

Best regards, Julian

_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
Ietf@xxxxxxxx
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf



--
Website: http://hallambaker.com/

_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
Ietf@xxxxxxxx
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf

[Index of Archives]     [IETF Annoucements]     [IETF]     [IP Storage]     [Yosemite News]     [Linux SCTP]     [Linux Newbies]     [Fedora Users]