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

[Carsten Bormann <[e-mail]>]

On 26. Jan 2022, at 22:38, Jay Daley <[e-mail]> 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.
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