On Wed, Jul 10, 2019 at 3:05 PM Nico Williams <nico@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Wed, Jul 10, 2019 at 02:44:30PM -0400, Kathleen Moriarty wrote:
> Building on Melinda's comments, I recently helped a couple of new authors.
> I pointed them to the XML template and the plug-in to XMLmind. They
> produced a draft rather quickly with very few questions. They had not
> worked much with XML, but had enough experience with other format
> languages. They made use of the plug-in features and used it differently
> than I do. I switch back to see the XML and fix things. They were just
> excited to generate a draft in which they felt they were contributing.
Yeah, it does seem lik the XML hate is mostly just that, but that our
use of XML is not really a blocker. But these are feelings we're
talking about -- all subjective.
Better than talking about the RSE situation though.
It is not the fact that XML is used, it is the way XML is used.
SGML is a horrible specification with a lot of stuff that is just terrible. But it does have some good parts and there is a logic to some (not all) of the baroque complexity.
The XML2RFC DTD was written by someone who didn't have much familiarity with HTML or XML. It puts text in places where text should not go and it uses a completely different set of tags to achieve what was already established.
It doesn't much matter because XML2RFC is not an editing format, it is merely the input format to the editing tools. It is easy to convert HTML, markdown or word to that format.
I have absolutely no problem using XML as a document format. It is what it is good for. I have a LOT of problems trying to use XML as a data format and not for want of trying. I wrote some of the first XML protocol specs. The problem using XML for data is that it gives you six ways to encode a piece of data when you really want there to be one data model and limit the encoding choices to the absolute bare minimum.
