Re: [xml2rfc] [Tools-discuss] [Rfc-markdown] Move beyond RFC 7997

["Martin J. Dürst" <[e-mail]>]

On 2023-01-20 23:20, Carsten Bormann wrote:

> The experiment to have xml2rfc mechanically chaperone RFC 7997 has failed, and we need to recover from that experiment — v3.16.0 is a start, but just a start.
> (This is compounded by the fact that RFC 7997 is misguided as the way forward for RFCs, but that is a different discussion where I can imagine there could be reasonably different opinions.)

When saying something is misguided, it's usually good to say which 
direction one would wish it would go. Otherwise, there's a danger for 
misunderstandings.

It may be that Marc, or some others, would agree with "misguided", but 
would say that allowing anything beyond ASCII was a mistake. I know most 
people on this list (starting with Carsten) would disagree.

My guess is that Carsten meant that RFC 7997 didn't go far enough. I 
would agree with that. I think there are at least two areas where RFC 
7997 can be extended:

- Formulæ: Using Greek letters, symbols,... in formulæ would make many
   of them easier to understand. But RFC　7997 currently doesn't allow
   that. I personally would fully support that.

- High quality quotes, hyphens, and the like. I think this is a
   worthwhile goal, but it requires quite a bit of thought because this
   is an area where differences between characters are indeed sometimes
   minuscule, and not all authors are alert enough to these differences.

   Also, we'd need to have (at least a pointer to) a style guide, we
   don't want different RFCs to use different quotation conventions.

   While I think that in general for non-ASCII characters (examples,
   formulæ,...), the authors/editors/reviewers/approvers will do 95%
   of the job of making sure they use the right characters, and the
   RPC will just do an additional check, I fully expect that some
   authors/editors (including probably myself) will submit rfcs-to-be
   with ASCII quotes and hyphens, and will rely on the RPC to fix
   that.

Anyway, for the two points above, and possibly others, we need a policy 
change, and so we need to move the discussion to the RSWG. I hope we can 
do that soon.

Regards,   Martin.


> I’d rather spend the time discussing what we need to do to support the efforts of the authors, the reviewers, and the RPC editors in creating high-quality documents.