Re: New Non-WG Mailing List: Ietf-and-github -- Discussion of using GitHub in IETF activities, particularly for Working Groups

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

On Tue, Jan 26, 2016 at 9:40 PM, John C Klensin <[e-mail]> wrote:
> Strongly agree with Joel.  If this is something individual
> document authors and editors people want to use, great.   OTOH,
> were it to evolve into a requirement, doing so would reduce the
> range of people who could reasonably volunteer to act as
> document authors and that would be a step in the wrong direction.
>
> FWIW, I'm actually concerned about the trends toward making
> xml2rfc a requirement rather a useful optional tool.  Again,
> individual ways of working differ and, at least for I-Ds, I'd
> prefer to maximize author efficiency rather than trying to force
> everyone into the same mold.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/phb-build-tools/

See RFCTool.

I pushed the source for the version with the installer package but not
the installer itself yet. The code is complete enough to have been
used to produce one published RFC. There are some bugs in some code
paths.

Currently the code has only been tested on Windows but it is all in
.NET and should run on either mono or Netcore. The Word converter has
lost support for bulleted lists and tables since I moved to an open
source library for the file interface.


The tools allow drafts to be created in any of these formats

Word (.docx), Markdown (.md), HTML, XML2RFC (not the new schema yet).

Text can be output in any of the following formats

Word (.docx), Markdown (.md), HTML, XML2RFC, TXT


So if you have a collaborator who uses Markdown, you can convert the
file to Word, use it to find all his grammar and spelling errors and
then return the document in markdown.


At present I use Word as my source input and target XML. If you are a
Visual Studio user however, you can use Markdown, HTML or XML input in
one window and generate TXT, XML, etc in another. This does not work
for Word due to the library having a hardcoded dependency on reading
input from a file.

The tools also maintain references, [!RFC5822] creates a normative
reference. [~RFC822] creates an informative. The code will also build
concordances of occurrences of normative language
[MUST/SHOULD/MAY/REQUIRED/etc.].

You can also include text from files in other formats. So my protocol
compiler generates HTML output for describing reference sections and I
typically generate examples in Markdown and both can be included in a
Word Document.


The code is in C# if people want to edit. I probably won't do much on
it until the new RFC tools become available. My objective is to be
able to round trip from HTML source.

The only time I see the XML is when I upload stuff to IETF drafts.

Some stuff written using it:

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7633
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-hallambaker-json-web-service/
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-hallambaker-udf/
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-hallambaker-mesh-architecture/
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-hallambaker-mesh-developer/
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-hallambaker-mesh-reference/