Re: [Tools-discuss] [rfc-i] what metric replaces page-count?

[Julian Reschke <[e-mail]>]

Am 13.04.2021 um 01:09 schrieb Nico Williams:
> On Mon, Apr 12, 2021 at 10:55:46AM -0400, Richard Barnes wrote:
>> Lawyers and judges are happy to cite by section.  Time to move on from
>> tired, inaccurate metaphors.
>
> But Michael was not asking about citations.  He was asking for a
> complexity metric.
>
> Speaking of sections for citations _and_ metrics, the ITU-T x.68x and
> x.69x series documents do a great job of breaking everything down into
> many many teeny tiny sections, which makes it very easy to refer very
> specifically to parts of their texts, and since they're all small,
> counting them might be a useful metric.
>
> I think it would be much harder for us to adopt that approach than
> anything we might do regarding pagination, but I have to say that I like
> many-tiny-sections, and it would be especially nice to have all MUSTs,
> SHOULDs, and so on, referenceable by section number just by dint of
> their containing sections being so small.
>
> Many-tiny-sections is _mostly_ a matter of style, but in the ITU-T specs
> I mentioned, only top-level sections and sub-sections have titles, with
> sub-sub-sections having no title and the first paragraph on the same
> line as the subsection number.  That may require xml2rfc support.  E.g.:
>
>     8.   Basic encoding rules
>     ...
>     8.19 Encoding of an object identifier value
>
>     8.19.1 The encoding of an object identifier value shall be primitive.
>
>     8.19.2 The contents octets shall be an (ordered) list of encodings of
>     subidentifiers (see 8.19.3 and 8.19.4) concatenated together.
>
>     Each subidentifier ...
>
>     8.19.3 The number of subidentifiers ...
>
> where sections and sub-sections have titles, but sub-sub-sections do
> not.
> ...

We do number paragraphs, which seem to be almost the same granularity.
The only difference is that the paragraph number is not accessible in
all formats.

Best regards, Julian