Re: [Tools-discuss] Why do we even have text formats any more?

[Martin Thomson <[e-mail]>]

On Wed, Jul 28, 2021, at 12:22, Robert Sparks wrote:
> "for new things"

Of course.  Anything that is in v3 format could get this treatment.

> diff

Yeah, I noted that.

It is clear to me that HTML tools are just not good enough.  Oddly, this is not because they couldn't just diff the text, but because they try to do so much more, like capture style or element choice changes as well as text changes.

For this, and for Ekr's use case, or anything where the goal is to remove noise, having text renderings available is useful.  

My pitch here is mostly about the most common case, which is people reading the documents in a web browser (and maybe those who print them too).  Keeping text because people have processes or tools that rely on text is probably necessary, if only because that means being able to present the entire series in a nominally consistent format.

I do think that the htmlizer can go in that case.

> create a writer for it that builds it from the xml source rather than trying to 
> pull things by heuristics from the text. 

Yeah, this is a neat idea, and it would avoid some of the issues I've discovered.  That said, the marginal benefit for the engineering cost involved seems unjustified in light of the HTML restyling option here.

> the processor at the datatracker will get the references wrong. 

Interesting.  Is this because people use some combination of entity references and processing instructions and fear that those will be filled in poorly?  That seems like a reasonable concern.  Part of it might derive from the fact that people have their own (skewed or hacked) local reference caches that they want to use in generating the final output.  I believe that xml2rfc can already produce XML with inline references, which draws from local sources.  Maybe we just need to document that process better for those people.

That and make the entire references infrastructure more reliable.  I routinely have build failures due to reference fetches that fail.