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

[paul.hoffman at vpnc.org (Paul Hoffman)]

\On 1 Mar 2016, at 9:47, Joe Hildebrand (jhildebr) wrote:

> 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.

Exactly right.

> 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.

A more deterministic way would be the the preptool embody both of 
Julian's two rules and output sections with the correct names and @pn 
attributes.

--Paul Hoffman