--On Friday, 29 November, 2019 09:30 +1300 Brian E Carpenter <brian.e.carpenter@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> AFAIR, the intent was to *paginate*, nothing more (yes, no >> headers, footers, no page numbers). > > What I care most about is to have a side-by-side diff format > as useful as rfcdiff produces. From a practical point of view, > that has been the greatest benefit of pagination and fixed > width font for many years now. The ability to print on a line > printer or a Diabolo hasn't been important for 25 years or so. I think others have commented on the assumption that pagination is good only if the document is headed for a line printer, but it may be worth pointing out that a recent errata submission may have identified a weakness in rfcdiff. An erratum submitted last April complained about an extended example in RFC 5321 being internally inconsistent about leading spaces that turn out to be important. (see https://www.rfc-editor.org/errata/eid5711 for details, but they aren't important). The problem is that the XML source appears to be correct -- leading spaces in both parts of the example -- but the XML output (under v2) isn't. This wasn't caught caught during AUTH48 or earlier, or apparently in the decade between 5321's publication and the erratum, at least in because the author was relying on rfcdiff and it is apparently insensitive to leading, as well as other types of spaces. I don't think that is a case for an emergency fix to rfcdiff, especially one that might have side-effects I haven't thought about, nor a fix to v2 of xml2rfc, but it should be another reminder than we two be very careful about what xml2rfc produces, especially in a world in which the XML is the canonical form but that there is no requirement that the IETF's favorite xml2rfc processor be used to process that source (and I don't know enough to know whether the IETF-approved Style Sheet covers this situation or not). best, john
