Re: [Tools-discuss] .txt? [I-D Action: draft-xxx.txt]

[Carsten Bormann <[e-mail]>]

>> As a format for authoring, making the input vastly more complicated in the name of some lofty goal (here: standards conformance) is exactly the leading symptom of the v3 development process.  Offering a bespoke, efficient(*) way of keyboarding IETF document references is exactly the right way to handle this, at least for people still authoring in XML.
> 
> It is not "vastly more complicated". It's a different syntax (with the
> benefit of it not being PI-based which is yet another XML complication
> for most authors). (*)

Yes.  Not using PIs means that this feature now comes under the strict eyes of the chaperone, the RNG validation.
So we all have to fix up the RFCXML RNC to make this feature available in various environments.
This is not progress.

Also, the fact that there now need to be full URIs instead of more reasonable document identifiers is confusing people.
(Not that the old ones were particularly good, but they should have been simplified, not pessimized.)

Yes, PIs are unclean in some universe.  They are also useful for adding features where being clean gets in the way.

> IFIUC, you miss the feature of not having to specify the complete URL of
> the reference? (Or is there something else I'm not aware of?).

Typing full URLs is not a good use of author time.

> (*) And, BTW the *other* way to include stuff as explained in
> <https://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/rfc7749.html#including.files>
> continues to work, as it's just a basic XML feature.

Which is, of course the one I used during the first 10 years of using RFCXML; I wasn’t even aware about the PI form before I moved away from keyboarding XML.
But others were (and some still use XML), and I’m trying to be their advocate here.

Grüße, Carsten