Re: [xml2rfc-dev] --table-borders

Double response:

> On 27/01/2022, at 10:55 AM, Robert Sparks <rjsparks@nostrum.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> On 1/26/22 3:38 PM, Jay Daley wrote:
>> 
>>> On 26/01/2022, at 5:48 PM, Kesara Rathnayake <kesara@staff.ietf.org> wrote:
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On 25/01/22 10:26 pm, Miek Gieben wrote:
>>>> Hello,
>>>> xml2rfc has gained a --table-borders flag, which changes how tables are rendered (in text,
>>>> didn't check the html). There is another way of changing how a document looks and that is
>>>> the indexInclude attribute in the <rfc> tag.
>>>> I think/feel that any option that changes the look of the document should be included in
>>>> the rfc tag? Or that we default to only one way of doing things. I.e. indexInclude only
>>>> works when there are <iref>s so why not make it always true? This might involve more
>>>> discussion for table borders...
>>> --table-borders flag only has visible differences in text mode [1].
>>> Shall we stick with one border style for text outputs and get rid of this flag?
>> Personally speaking, I agree with Miek that all formatting should be controlled within the document and not externally in the tool.  So yes, it should go and if the functionality is needed then it should be a new language feature.
>> 
>> Jay
> 
> That was an anti-goal of the 779* design work, which intended to have the xml capture the semantics of the document, and not provide layout instructions. If we do as you suggest, that's a big shift in requirements on the vocabulary, and pushes for much more frequent vocabulary version changes does it not?

We have features such as the newline attribute in the <dl> element that appear to be layout only and Carsten has listed some others below.

> 
> There will also be (and have been) arguments about including _anything_ in the vocabulary that would influence the behavior of only one of the renderers.

We already have that with the type="svg" attribute of the <artwork> element, which is arguably has a much bigger impact than a table border.

> On 27/01/2022, at 11:41 AM, Carsten Bormann <cabo@tzi.org> wrote:
> 
> On 26. Jan 2022, at 22:38, Jay Daley <exec-director@ietf.org> wrote:
>> 
>> Personally speaking, I agree with Miek that all formatting should be controlled within the document and not externally in the tool.  
> 
> +1.
> 
>> So yes, it should go and if the functionality is needed then it should be a new language feature.
> 
> Somebody wanted the —table-borders feature, or it wouldn’t have been implemented.
> It would be interesting to find out for what document, but since the information is not in the documents, that may be hard to reconstruct.
> 
> Do we know if any RFCs are rendered with that feature?
> 
> What does the feature look like?  Too lazy to look it up/try it out at the moment.
> 
> Anyway, having a global flag on a document that changes formatting for all tables in that document is unspeakable.
> Of course, it works for trivial documents that have only one kind of table in it.
> 
> Yes, information of this kind needs to be kept with the individual elements of the document that receive the alternate formatting.
> Of course, we already have attributes for similar cases in the grammar, e.g. dl/@spacing (and, one could argue, dl/@newline), ol/@indent, ... — I didn’t try to make an encyclopedic list, but the ideology of semantic markup falls a bit short when one-size-fits-all formatting doesn’t quite work.
> 
> The fact that, without Henrik, we have grammar ossification, means that we probably can’t fix anything before we get a v3.1.

We have the XML and Style Guide Change Management Team https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/browse/xml-sg-cmt/

Jay

> Let’s not forget to put these things in when it finally comes to that.
> 
> By the way, “tweaks" like this were one of the original motivations for having processing instructions in SGML…
> 
> Grüße, Carsten
> 
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-- 
Jay Daley
IETF Executive Director
exec-director@ietf.org