Re: On XML and $EDITORs (Re: Things that used to be clear (was ...)) "Living Documents") side meeting at IETF105.)

[Phillip Hallam-Baker <[e-mail]>]

The interface to the IETF document process is exactly what I use xml2rfc
for.

If I am producing a -bis document, I pull the .xml from wherever I can find
it and convert it to word. Then I convert it back to upload it.

But since we are discussing all this. How about we specify the rest of the
interface. I would really like it if I could make the document submission
from RFCtool.

So normally, I type
rfctool %DocSource%\hallambaker-mesh-5-protocol.docx  /auto /cache=bib.xml

It would be nice to be able to submit a changed document with something like
rfctool %DocSource%\hallambaker-mesh-5-protocol.docx  /auto /cache=bib.xml
/submit


There is a small corner case which is that if you have multiple documents
and you are submitting updates to three out of five, you want the new docs
to reference the new versions of the updates documents but the old versions
of the ones that are not being submitted.

So it is probably something a bit more git-like and there is a /stage
operation to mark the draft as one of the ones to be updated and a /submit
operation to ship them out.

[I would also prefer to be able to authenticate the submission by signing
it with a digital signature rather than the email callback scheme. Which
might sound like feature creep but could actually simplify providing the
capability as it would allow a stateless submission. The XML would have to
be expanded to specify the signature key(s) allowed.]




On Thu, Jul 11, 2019 at 1:32 PM Keith Moore <[e-mail]>
wrote:

>
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> > On Jul 11, 2019, at 1:24 PM, Nico Williams <[e-mail]>
> wrote:
> >
> >> On Thu, Jul 11, 2019 at 09:41:09AM -0400, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
> >> But the bigger point here surely, is that this thread is now an editor
> war.
> >
> > Sigh.  That was not my intention, but the opposite.  My point was/is
> > that the choice of $EDITOR shouldn't matter, and that our choice of XML
> > as the canonical or submission format should not -and DO NOT- preclude
> > $EDITORs that hide the XML from the user.
>
> Actually the one thing that xml seems like it might be a decent choice
> for, is a stable back end interface that could accept input from a variety
> of editors and text processors and allow RFCs and I-Ds to be handled by a
> common toolset.  Except that it’s not stable.
>
> (It’s not a particularly good interface for that purpose, but it doesn’t
> have to be - the main requirements are that it be adequate and stable.)
>
> Keith
>
>
>