On Tue, Jul 09, 2019 at 09:01:11PM -0700, Christian Huitema wrote: > On 7/9/2019 1:34 AM, Nico Williams wrote: > > XML with webby $EDITOR tooling would do. > > Tooling is just one of the problems with XML2RFC. The real issue is > that XML2RFC is completely specific to the IETF. This translate into > training requirements for people who need to actually use that markup > language, absence of easy to use tools because the user pool is too > small to sustain development, and then a reliance on translators > between an easy-to-edit format and the publication. For example, a > team of authors would be using markdown and Github, and using a tool > chain to produce XML2RFC. But if a copy editor suggests updates to the > XML text, these updates cannot easily imported to the original > markdown document, or to the markdown starter for the "bis" project. Office and LibreOffice use XML too, but users don't see it. That's what I meant by "webby $EDITOR tooling" above: a bloody real UI, a browser UI. > I understand why we adopted an XML format 20 years ago. That was > better than NROFF, and there was a hope that the whole publishing > industry would standardize on XML. It did not, and now the IETF has > its very own markup language. If I really understood TeX and LaTeX and LyX, I'd have produced a template for LyX and use it directly, no XML in sight. That's because LyX is the best GUI editor I know for this sort of document. As it is I still don't have XML in sight with lyx2rfc anyways: the XML just a hidden step in the tooling[*]. Just like Word and friends. Because I knew (and still know) very little about TeX, I wrote lyx2rfc instead. lyx2rfc exports LyX docs to XHTML and then applies an XSL to convert to xml2rfc schema, then xml2rfc to render. When I use lyx2rfc I do not see raw XML ever, nor raw TeX for that matter. It just works (though it's been a while since I touched it, and it really needs an update to the latest xml2rfc schema). Which, along with *Office, proves that we can have our XML cake and eat it too. So why didn't I go with Office or LibreOffice? LyX was very accessible, and the learning curve for its XHTML export format much lower than for the others. If we'd gone with roff... then writing any tooling like lyx2rfc would be much harder. I shudder at the thought, and instead have to think about developing an editor, or thank my lucky stars if someone else does it first (think NroffEdit). Extracting structure and semantics from roff is much harder than XML, where no extraction is necessary. The whole point of XML is that it's quite good for _documents_ (as opposed to JSON, which is decidedly not) and has XSLT, so you can convert between schemas. lyx2rfc's XSLs, and Julian Reschke's XSLs, prove that XSLT is a powerful tool, and that XML was the right choice because of it. But anyways, XML or whatever -- that should just be a detail most users never need be aware of. xml2rfc is just incomplete, that's all. I had hoped that others would like lyx2rfc enough that I could get help developing and maintaining it. It's doubtful that that would happen now, but I still think that LyX a viable approach to having a decent GUI for authoring I-Ds and typesetting RFCs. LyX is open source, after all, and much smaller and more accessible than LibreOffice, and it is more semantic too. The only reason not to recommend LyX is that we really do need a browser UI, and LyX ain't that. No, IMO XML was by far the best choice. XML was the right choice. Nico --
