[rfc-i] RFCs from Markdown, XML2RFC, HTML and Word

[phill at hallambaker.com (Phillip Hallam-Baker)]

I realized that I could use my tool for maintaining Web Sites from MarkDown
and/or Word as a front end parser for my RFC Tool.

The tool is not yet complete but it is getting to the point where input
would be useful.

I have attached:

* The source files in xml2rfc, markdown, word and word as PDF
* A sample output file in plaintext form generated from the Word source

This is obviously not complete, the author fields are not used, nor does it
connect to the repositories to resolve references. But the code is there,
it just needs connecting up.

Most of the text is in the usual markdown style. The IETF specific stuff
goes in a pseudo-header at the start:

<ietf=draft-hallambaker-tlsfeature std trust200902 id sec>
<title>X.509v3 TLS Feature Extension
<short>TLS Feature Extension
<version>07
<author>Phillip Hallam-Baker
    <lastname>Hallam-Baker
    <initials>P. M.
    <firstname>Phillip
    <organization>Comodo Group Inc.
    <email>philliph at comodo.com
<bibliography="Bibliography.xml">
<bibliography="Cache.xml" cache="true">

This is in what I call 'rational XML'. Why bother with close tags,
attributes etc unless they are absolutely required and the parser can't
infer them from context?

But it occurs to me that for IETF use, we might want a different syntax
that does not look anything like XML so as to avoid the need to escape
characters everywhere. Writing specifications for XML web services in HTML
is one of the main things that convinced me we should move to JSON. I want
to be thinking about my design problem not my text processing markup.


So the above could be:

ietf: draft-hallambaker-tlsfeature std trust200902 id sec
title: X.509v3 TLS Feature Extension
short: TLS Feature Extension
version: 07

That is cleaner but now it starts to look like stuff that could be confused
with the body of the text :(

Or could do something like this:

[{meta]
ietf: draft-hallambaker-tlsfeature std trust200902 id sec
title: X.509v3 TLS Feature Extension
short: TLS Feature Extension
version: 07
[}meta]

Or:

[:ietf]    draft-hallambaker-tlsfeature std trust200902 id sec
[:title]   X.509v3 TLS Feature Extension
[:short]  TLS Feature Extension
[:version]  07

I am tending towards the last one.

The tools automatically seek out normative references [!RFC822] and non
normative [~RFC821].

The sequence [. is an escape for [


There is code to support tables, figures and to include source text from
other documents but making that work with the new front end will be rather
more involved.

Code is in .net. The non Word parts should work on any platform that has
mono support (OSX, Windows, Linux) but the Word part requires the Microsoft
API access which I think is only supported on Windows.


The final tool should have an output option for all the supported input
formats. Right now it only supports HTML and xml2rfc (old version).
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