[rfc-i] v3imp #8 Fragment tagging on sourcecode

[pkyzivat at alum.mit.edu (Paul Kyzivat)]

On 1/23/15 1:39 PM, Paul Hoffman wrote:
> On Jan 23, 2015, at 10:09 AM, Paul Kyzivat <pkyzivat at alum.mit.edu> wrote:
>> Different strokes for different folks.
>
> That's the problem. Sean is asking for a one-size-fits-all approach, without suggesting actual examples of a proposed solution.
>
>> This *can* work.
>
> By "work", I think of "is the solution understandable to a typical Internet Draft author", and here things fall apart. It is possible to mark artwork as a fragment; it may not be possible to sanely say what it is a fragment of. Many RFCs have multiple ABNF modules or ASN.1 modules, so there would have to be some way to say "this is a fragment of that module" *and* say "and the whole goes in this particular order".
>
>> It would work much better if you could automatically extract the collection of fragments when you want to process it.
>
> Fully agree. If we can come up with a way to help that automation while not confusing document authors, this seems worthwhile. However, complexity seems to be a negative here.

As I suggested earlier, the simplest thing I can think of here would be 
specify that if multiple artwork elements have the same name attribute, 
then the expectation is that they should be concatenated when extracted.

Then, as long as you specify the same type for all the elements with the 
same name, a verifier for that type can process it.

If you have a number of independent ABNF modules, then just give them 
different names.

	Thanks,
	Paul