Re: Alternative formats for IDs

[Douglas Otis <dotis at mail-abuse.org>]

On Jan 13, 2006, at 12:07 PM, Dave Crocker wrote:

> What is important is not the files used to tailor the production  
> service, but the prevalence of expertise and tools for that service.
>
> In reality, nroff expertise is isolated in a tiny community.  In  
> reality, xml expertise has become global.  That's not an assessment  
> of hypothetical, future adoption.  It is an assessment of  
> *existing* adoption.

Agreed.

Adopting an XML structure for the creation of RFCs and related  
documents should be moving in the right direction.  At some point,  
even removing nroff as a crutch may ensure greater conformity for  
tools used to process documents.  Although nroff is an extremely  
powerful and efficient word processing application, building upon  
more versatile and hierarchical structures offers many possibilities  
for managing the growing complexity of information being amassed.

Both approaches requires post processing together with the cut and  
paste of some templates.  As long as xml2rfc allows a means to bypass  
formatting difficulties in getting a good looking draft, regardless  
whether this requires 120 characters or 12, the end results in text  
form of either process _can_ be identical.  Cut and paste does not  
take much effort either way, and even the clumsiness for some  
operations in xml2rfc can be readily overcome.  XML data structures  
enable new features with less effort, like automatic generation of  
bibliographies or the insertion of hyperlinks in html output  
versions.  XML also has the ability to add new elements to  
accommodate new features without disrupting other forms of output.

-Doug


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