[rfc-i] draft-iab-html-rfc-02: references

[jhildebr at cisco.com (Joe Hildebrand (jhildebr))]

On 3/1/16, 10:26 AM, "Julian Reschke" <julian.reschke at gmx.de> wrote:



>If I understand your proposal correctly you propose that the old format 
>continues to be ok, 

Yes.

>but there'll be another way of doing things, that'll 
>be output by the preptool, 

Only if there is more than one <references> section.

>and that any formatter will have to 
>understand. That makes things worse (IMHO), because there are now *two* 
>ways to achieve the same thing -- you can't fix a complexity problem by 
>adding more complexity.

I'm open to a less-complex solution that has the property that ALL of the decisions on section numbering are made by the prep tool. Right now, the prep tool makes 90% of the decisions.

For example, I could imagine just putting a pn attribute on <references>, and telling the output formatters that if there is more than one <references>, they can compute the section number of the containing section by dropping the .1 from the first references/@pn.  That's at least a plain syntactic manipulation, which has been our standard to this point.

-- 
Joe Hildebrand