Re: [Tools-discuss] Why post text and not XML? (was: I-D statistics)

[Eric Rescorla <[e-mail]>]

On Sat, Mar 16, 2024 at 1:36 PM Brian E Carpenter <
[e-mail]> wrote:

> John,
>
> Thanks for explaining.
>
> In line...
>
>
> On 17-Mar-24 07:51, John C Klensin wrote:
> >
> >
> > --On Saturday, March 16, 2024 17:13 +1300 Brian E Carpenter
> > <[e-mail]> wrote:
>
> >     =================
> >
> > For anyone interested and in the hope of not having to repeat
> > this again...
> >
> > Especially for long, complex, and long-lived documents,
> > especially those that are replacements, significant updates for
> > earlier documents, or merges of others, I use extensive comments
> > in the XML to track changes and decisions.   Other comments are
> > used to provide information to, or prepare for discussions with,
> > the RPC about why particular text phrasing and constructions or
> > document organizations were chosen, etc.  With one current
> > document, those comments add up to more that 30% of the size of
> > the XML file.  Some of those comments are over 20 years old and
> > have been carried forward from xml2rfc v1 files associated with
> > previous documents.
>
> Understood. The "modern" approach is of course to embed such
> comments in GitHub issues, which tends to lead to self-censorship
> of any "unkind" comments, and then the nit-picking takes place
> on GitHub too.
>

I don't much care about the comments, but I would observe that a
consequence of having the XML kept private like this is to make it
more difficult for others to work on the documents, either by submitting
diffs to the text or by forking them and making their own documents.

So in that respect, I think the "modern" approach truly is superior,
though of course it's not the only way to obtain those benefits.

-Ekr