On 30.12.2010 12:43, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
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.
And lose metadata, automatic checking of references, cross-references, etc.
BTW: swapping files in email is indeed bad. It has nothing to do with
format. Why don't you use a public source control repository? (svn on
tools.ietf.org for WG stuff, or github...)
As a document format, the XML2RFC format is terrible. It uses all the
abominable features of SGML. Rather disappointingly for a format
Sorry? Which?
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.
It appears you're missing the benefits over HTML :-)
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.
Could you elaborate where you need to maintain them?
It would be much better if the references could be generated
automatically though.
Like just saying <xref target="RFC2616"/> and then the reference being
added at the end?
It's certainly possible to write a tool for that. How do you decide
whether the reference is Normative of Informative, though?
Anyway, a benefit of an XML-based format is that you can invent any kind
of extensions and write a simple-preprocessor implementing them. How do
you do that with Google Docs?
Best regards, Julian
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