Re: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

[Julian Reschke <[e-mail]>]

Doug Otis wrote:
> ...
> On Jul 13, 2009, at 1:10 PM, Julian Reschke wrote:
>> The "experimental" version (http://xml.resource.org/experimental.html) 
>> is as stable as predecessor versions; the main reason it hasn't been 
>> released is that the authors (IMHO) expected more boilerplate changes 
>> to occur.
>>
>> And what exactly do you mean by "cryptic entries"?
> 
> There was little documentation for what would satisfy the nit checker a 
> few months ago.  It was a challenge to know what was needed for the rfc 
> structure.  The needed ipr parameter appeared rather cryptic.
> ...

Well, the @ipr value needs to capture several dimensions, such as type 
of IPR *and* time scale (because the IETF rules keep changing). Of 
course the values could be made less cryptic, but this seems to be 
something of a bike shed discussion, as long as the values a well 
documented.

>> I think the right approach is to either help maintaining the TCL code, 
>> or to rewrite xml2rfc in a different language.
> 
> 
> To support the generation of MHTML, as some have suggested, the logical 
> intermediary format seems to be XSLT (for defining xml2rfc constructs).

We have that already (xml2rfc->XSLT->(X)HTML), in case you didn't notice.

> http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2557
> http://people.dsv.su.se/~jpalme/ietf/mhtml.html
> 
> IMHO, pre-processors with roff might offer simpler and cleaner inputs, 
> especially for the vision impaired.  A post process could then generate 
> simpler MHTML formats.

Best regards, Julian