Re: Last Call: 'Proposed Experiment: Normative Formatin AdditiontoASCII Text' to Experimental RFC (draft-ash-alt-formats)

[Iljitsch van Beijnum <iljitsch at muada.com>]

On 17-jun-2006, at 0:18, Joe Touch wrote:

> It's worth distinguishing the search for alternate normative output
> formats from the search for a standard input format.

I think the mistake is to make the output format normative. If we  
make the input format normative and publish that we're out of the  
woods: obviously the input format is editable, and if it's  
sufficiently (but not overly) well-defined output formats can be  
generated as desired.

> > I'm very partial to xml2rfc,

I'm sorry to be so negative, but I hate it. The stupid thing can't  
even handle my name properly so I have to live with what it does or  
edit the result manually.

The problem with xml2rfc is that tries to be too smart by encoding  
semantics. In theory this is the right thing to do, because you can  
then do stuff like search for a specific author without catching  
acknowledgment sections or find certain versions of the legalese. But  
the problem is that this requires tools that either don't exist at  
all, or aren't in wide use, so in practice it's actually harder to  
work with the XML source than with the resulting draft/RFC format.

XML2RFC once made me miss a draft deadline by choking on some XML I  
wrote without saying why or where, leaving me with an impossible  
debugging task. Formatting drafts in vi may take longer on average  
than working with xml2rfc but it's more deterministic.

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