Re: [Rfc-markdown] Prevent double space after initial?

[Carsten Bormann <[e-mail]>]

On 1. Nov 2021, at 11:59, Julian Reschke <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> Putting workarounds into the XML source to address issues in the TXT
> output certainly is not a good idea.

Wrong mailing list.

Over in Rfc-interest I would note that we are slowly coming to terms with the fact that RFCXML needs to be able to generate multiple output formats.
(The dominant ideology during development of RFCXMLv3 was that HTML is replacing all other formats, so we don’t have to care.)

This means that we want the semantic information that is needed to generate these formats (or perform other processing, such as validating the code) to be available in the XML form.

Whether sentence detection is such semantic information can be debated.
I certainly learned that this was important when I started to use computers for text processing in the 1970s.
(I since have learned to suppress the reflex to keyboard \& after each non-period dot…)

The root cause for the specific problem that Lars had is of course our addiction to initials, which has other problems as well [1].

Back to the purpose of the mailing list:
Markdown was mostly designed to generate HTML, and since HTML by design can’t do anything useful with sentence detection, markdown has no support for it.
So support for anything that an author wants to do here is going to be an afterthought.

Grüße, Carsten

[1]: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/