Re: [Tools-discuss] xml2rfc in --v2 mode -- bug report?

[Julian Reschke <[e-mail]>]

Am 12.06.2022 um 19:05 schrieb John C Klensin:
> ...
> But this is a v2 document whose first version dates to early
> 2017, when v3 was still in its infancy and, IIR, the online
> version of xml2rfc would not yet handle v3.  RelaxNG was, again
> IIR, only introduced with RFC 7749 in February 2016, bringing
> the change from a DTD-based definition to a Schema-based one
> with it.  Most of the changes described in its Appendix B had
> (as RFC 7749 says) been adopted some years earlier and templates
> adjusted, so that the actual changes needed in 2016 were very
> small and many documents and templates did not require changes
> at all.   I also note that DOCTYPE appears in Section 4 of RFC
> 7749 with language that implies to me that it is required.
> ...

Trying to clarify:

- there never ever was a *need* to include a DOCTYPE

- RFC 7749 was published over 16 years after 2629. During that time
frame, the grammar had been extended quite a bit, sometimes with lots of
community discussion, sometimes rather ad-hoc. RFC 7749 documents the
common grammar understood by the existing implementations (the TCL
script, the Python re-implementation, and my XSLT) at the time of
publication. It's not a new design, just an inventory of what was there
back then, to be used as basis when working on v3 (and, fwiw, I think
that has mostly worked well)

- Section 4 explains how to declare named character entities
(https://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/rfc7749.html#special.unicode.code.points).
These indeed need some kind of doctype declaration (for precision:
https://www.w3.org/TR/2008/REC-xml-20081126/#sec-prolog-dtd) to work;
but that doesn't imply that you need a full DTD, nor that the
recipient/processor will actually look at it even if you have one.

To be clear: if you don't want to type non-ASCII character codes
directly, you'll need a Unicode-capable editor, use numeric references
(such as " " instead of " "), or declare these entities; and
the only way to do that in XML is what Section 4 of RFC 7749 describes
(and I believe Jay's note about referencing the RelaxNG grammar using a
PI is misleading as it doesn't help with that case at all).

Finally, I do agree that xml2rfc's attempt to discourage use of DTDs
might be well-intended, but really increases confusion with something
that's already confusing enough in XML.

Best regards, Julian