Re: [xml2rfc-dev] RFC 7991 issue #37: Schema Issue, RFC 7991, In Section 2.12, <br>

[Paul Hoffman <[e-mail]>]

On 2018-10-01 19:11, Miek Gieben wrote:
> Are we still expecting humans to write this XML directly?

Yes. We also expect them to validate it before turning in a draft in XML format.

> I ask because the
> number of one-offs is already staggering (esp. with attribute naming and
> the number of them).

Yes. That comes with using any markup language for rich documents. We struggled with this during the development of the v3 spec.

> I would hope to see some simplification of the spec, which I this case
> means allowing br in more places or disallowing the element entirely.

See Julian's response in the thread above. The WG decided that it didn't like <br> because it causes the author to expect things that might not be true in all renderers, such as in the middle of section headings, as a run of <br><br>, and so on. However, there were many use cases for line breaks within a cell in a table because of the limitations on the horizontal space in cells.

On Oct 1, 2018, at 12:53 PM, Henrik Levkowetz <[e-mail]> wrote:

> The more I think about this, the more I realise it is a very very good
> point, and could also be a very important point.
> 
> In draft-levkowetz-xml2rfc-v3-implementation-notes, I notice that of the
> 16 RFC 7991 schema-related issues, 7 address schema irregularities or
> inconsistencies of one kind or another.  In order to make this easier on
> both people who manually write draft XML, and on tool creators who generate
> draft XML from other sources, I think we should make it an explicit goal of
> the next revision to simplify and regularize the vocabulary.

In this case, doing so would require us to remove <br> everywhere, I believe, because otherwise the output will surprise some and piss off others.

--Paul Hoffman