Re: [rfc-i] deprecating relref

> On 10/04/2021, at 11:29 AM, John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> wrote:
> 
> It appears that Peter Saint-Andre <stpeter@mozilla.com> said:
>> On 4/9/21 2:18 AM, Julian Reschke wrote:
>> 
>>> FWIW, I believe the direction to insert *all* defaults is totally
>>> misguided; it leads to "canonical" XML that's full with completely
>>> useless information.
>> 
>> Agreed. The whole point of a default is you don't need to include it (as
>> long as the schema doesn't change from under you, so let's not do that).
> 
> If you look at RFC 7998, the reason the preptool fills in all the
> defaults is exactly so that the defaults can change later.
> 
> I don't think that is a terribly compelling argument, particularly since we have yet to
> see a default we'd want to change, but it's not an accident.

I would be interested in how people think we can get around this problem.  I can see a couple of solutions

- when a default changes then at that point the prep tool inserts this new 'default' everywhere so in fact the default isn’t changing but we still get the effect of it changing.  That way we only add all the extra stuff when we have to.

- the style guide version (or wherever the defaults are documented) is encoded in the XML in machine readable format.

Jay

> 
> R's,
> John
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-- 
Jay Daley
IETF Executive Director
jay@ietf.org