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

[mellon at fugue.com (Ted Lemon)]

On Jan 23, 2015, at 2:44 PM, Sean Leonard <dev+ietf at seantek.com> wrote:
> To eliminate transcription errors, don't attempt to stitch disparate <sourcecode> and <artwork> elements together. The standards author SHOULD provide normative modules, such as in <attachment> elements. Making sure that "inline" content (<sourcecode> and <artwork>) matches normative "attachment" content is an editorial matter.

Actually, I think there can be a number of different approaches that make sense:

1. The RFC in a sense annotates the ABNF, which is presented in labeled chunks marked for order, or else defaulting to being in order.   The document processor could in principle extract the ABNF, concatenate it, and present you with what you need.

2. The RFC has ABNF interspersed, which may or may not be complete, and the full ABNF is presented in an appendix.   It would be ideal if the appendix could be generated as a concatenation of the ABNF in the main text, possibly with additional fragments.   Failing that, the fragments should be automatically checkable against the complete ABNF to make sure that they are consistent.   Either of these approaches are straightforward.

3. The RFC has ABNF in an appendix, and references the ABNF in the appendix appear throughout the document.   Now you need anchor tags for the references.   I don't think this is actually very usable, though, so I'm not sure we really need to support this mode.   But I agree that we need to support anchor tags.