Re: [Tools-arch] Recommendation 6: Architectural model for clients

[Martin Thomson <[e-mail]>]

On Thu, Apr 29, 2021, at 11:12, John Levine wrote:
> In principle, it's straightfoward to translate Word files into other
> formats. (The file format is ISO/IEC 29500, a bunch of XML files in a
> zip archive. The bad news is that the spec is over 5,000 pages.)
> We could build tools to turn Word files into our dialect of
> markdown or XML, give or take some negotiations about stylesheets
> and markup conventions.

Sounds good.  We probably need to stop saying "build" though.  I used code that I found on a website and it worked nicely.

My sense is that these tools just cherry pick a very narrow set of things, so it should be possible to re-tread the path they have taken, but I haven't seen any need to do that.

> This is why I like Jay's approach of trying to figure out what our I-D
> authors actually do [...]

I thought that the survey results were clear here on this point.  There are far too many people who use Joe Touch's Word template.  I think that it's clear that these people need a better alternative (or Joe's template needs some attention so that it can produce XML).

> Are you sure it wasn't a text diff of the XML?  That works OK if the
> incoming XML is in a format close to what the RPC uses, not so great
> otherwise.

You are right, of course.  And that is perfectly adequate for my purposes.  Mostly.  Maybe a true XML diff wouldn't mangle things so badly when things get out of sync.