Re: [Rfc-markdown] Author listing in XML and Markdown?

[Carsten Bormann <[e-mail]>]

On 2020-03-11, at 23:16, Alice Russo <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> Hi Eric,
> 
> [CC'ing Carsten because perhaps he can share some kramdown-rfc2629 magic.]

I might be able to cook up some such magic if needed.

> There is no role="contributor". There is the new <contact> element in the xml2rfc v3 vocabulary, which is essentially the same as <author>. (For the v3 vocabulary, the RelaxNG is here: https://svn.tools.ietf.org/svn/tools/xml2rfc/trunk/cli/xml2rfc/data/v3.rnc)
> 
> So, two methods come to mind:
> 1) Copy & paste the desired output (from a text file) into an <artwork> element in the contributors section.

… which looks quite ugly.

> 2) If using xml2rfc w/ the v3 vocabulary, you can simply change <author> to <contact> and put those elements directly into the contributors section.

So you have to put in that section manually, while the “authors’ addresses” section is put in by XML2RFC based on the front matter information.  Not something I would have designed…

But it is a small matter of programming to support this.  
Might do that later today (CET today).

So the idea would be that you have an additional YAML section for contributors, like this:

author:
 - name: Henk Birkholz
 - name: Max Pritikin
 - name: Robert Moskowitz
contributor:
 - name: Carsten Bormann

(I stripped out all the other metadata, I hope you get the idea.)
That makes it minimally painful to move people around between the two, which happens a lot because of the straightjacket that the five-author rule is.

Now how do we get this info into the Contributors Section (RFC 7322, 4.11).
As I said, this section is not automatically inserted by XML2RFC.
In the authoring XML, it is the last section (unnumbered) of the main body (i.e., before the back matter), so kramdown-rfc could simply insert it automatically there, just like xml2rfc then does with authors’ addresses.

The problem with that is that Contributors also can be more like a free text section, as in acknowledgements.  I’m not sure how those would mix in practice; I haven’t seen a Contributors section that had both contact info and free text.
(And no, I don’t know why this isn’t “contributors’ addresses".)

Of course, all this only works with v3 processing rules.

I’m CCing rfc-markdown and removing some text to make this less of a violation of etiquette, apologizing in advance if it still is.

Grüße, Carsten