Re: [xml2rfc] Page break controls (Was:#311 (Version 2 cli): ability to suppress author org on first page)

[Carsten Bormann <[e-mail]>]

> We had epic discussions about this topic, and IMHO the general feeling was that paginated output really isn't that important.

Well, if there ever was consensus on that, it was pretty rough...

> Even the attribute you're referring to didn't get a real consensus.

And it shouldn’t, because tweaking (which is what we are talking about here) is not semantic markup.
This should be a PI.

> Why would we ever want to control whether the ToC starts on a new page or not? (yes, that's a serious question).

Because there are some authors that care?
(I like to have at least one of those picky people as a co-author on an RFC; then I can at least be sure that things like DOIs are going to be right :-)

> 
>> (When I was poking at the IAB no-author-org-names-on-front-page issue,
>> I used the draft xml for RFC 7754 as a test case, and wanted to see if
>> I could make the xml2rfc output look exactly as the published RFC.  In
>> order to do that, I had to insert <?rfc needLines="-1" ?>

Whoa, there is such a thing?  I always used <vspace blankLines='999’/>, which looks strange in the HTML :-)

>> in a number
>> of places, and also introduce a new PI "tocpagebreak" to trigger the
>> needed page break before the Table of Contents.  Needing manual insertion
>> of page break points because there are no proper orphan and widow controls
>> is sad.  I don't see why we should not provide tools which will let the
>> RFC Production Center staff easily produce documents that actually look
>> the way they think they should look ...)
> 
> Apparently you're looking at this from a different angle than I do. My proposal is to entirely get rid of the "we control vertical whitespace" topic. It's - again IMHO - an entire waste of time.

Discussing whether there is a need indeed is — we will always disagree on this question.
So why don’t we let Henrik fix this bug and go on with our lives?

> Yes, the defaults should be sensible - thus, under normal conditions, we shouldn't see orphans or windows anyway.

Very much so.

We need tweaks when the formatter cannot see something that is important to a human consumer of the text, such as an unfortunate page break.

(Oh, and we may need different tweaks for different kinds of paginated output, such as PDF and TXT; that may be something that still needs to be put into the PI processing.)

Grüße, Carsten