Re: [xml2rfc] Tables in XML V3 - A downgrade

[Julian Reschke <[e-mail]>]

On 14.09.2019 11:19, Anders Rundgren wrote:
> ...
>> That said, I still don't understand what you're referring to when you
>> say "Paginated RfcMarkup is rather reducing readability and browsers can
>> print fairly well these days."
>
> Well, having code examples and tables interspersed with pagination
> information is not everybody's cup of tea :-)
>
> Unpaginated Web pages print fairly well these days.  I believe there
> even is a way to paginate specifically for printing.

Yes, but that requires the document to be HTML, not plain text. That's
what confused me.

rtfc2629.xslt generates the required CSS print information
(headers/footers etc). Unfortunately, browsers do not really care yet.
(PrinceXML does when generating PDF from HTML).

xml2rfc doesn't seem to generate it yet, but I'm sure it will at some point.

> ... >>> PIs could be used to keep the XML intact.
>>
>> I still don't get that.
>
> Maybe there is something I have misunderstood.
>
> The idea is simply that there would be a single master document (in XML)
> that would conditionally produce different output depending on
> directives given by the author.
>
> Since the transition to new formats always take long time, PIs could
> ease that.

The vocabulary has supported plain text fallbacks for ages, see
<https://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/rfc7749.html#rfc.section.2.5.p.5>.
xml2rfc-as-implemented introduces something new for that, see
<https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-levkowetz-xml2rfc-v3-implementation-notes-09#section-3.1.1>.

>>> XHTML is a deprecated W3C standard currently used by RFCs.  It is not
>>> a problem but switching to HTML5 is preferable.
>>
>> "currently used by RFCs" where?
>
> In RfcMarkup and HTML RFCs.

RfcMarkup has no official standing (and yes, I like it as well, and it
has served us well for a very long time). It apparently generates XHTML,
but the content is served as text/html on tools.ietf.org. It might be
good to change it to produce valid HTML5.

And when you say: "HTML RFCs", what are you referring to?

Best regards, Julian