Re: [xml2rfc] [Tools-discuss] [Rfc-markdown] New xml2rfc release: v3.16.0

["Martin J. Dürst" <[e-mail]>]

On 2023-01-20 23:04, Marc Petit-Huguenin wrote:
> On 1/20/23 05:47, Carsten Bormann wrote:
>> On 2023-01-20, at 14:16, Marc Petit-Huguenin <[e-mail]> wrote:
>>>
>>> <artwork> is one of the ways an example can be inserted in an xml2rfc document, so it could be used to clearly mark in a document examples that contain unlimited Unicode.
>>
>> The fact that artwork is completely exempted from the shunned character checking of xml2rfc is a nice example why the RFC7997 handling in xml2rfc is completely misguided.
>>
>> There is no indication whether artwork is normative or just supplies an example.
>>
>> What we did in RFC 9290 was to move text about the example that would have been fine within a normal paragraph of text into an artwork element.  That “solved” the problem (but created others, due to some complexity of doing RTL-only artwork).

It also looks really strange to have a paragraph of text broken into 
three pieces just because a single word in the middle needed to go into 
artwork.

>> What other I-Ds are doing now is putting all their equations in artwork.
>> The problem is that the text around those can’t really refer to α and β etc. that occurs in the equations.
>>
>> The logical, and fully absurd, conclusion is to move the rest of the text into artwork elements as well.  Hey, we could use nroff to generate word-wrapped artwork elements...
>>
> 
> I will always agree with more formalism.  RFC 7991 should have been designed to make the implementation of RFC 7997 (among others) possible.  Then xml2rfc tool should have been designed to exactly implement that version of RFC 7991 (and RFC 7996, etc...).

It's not that more formalism is always good. Let's say we introduced a 
<c> element to mark up characters. Would you want to write RFC as
<c>R</c><c>F</c><c>C</c>? I really hope not.

If it helps, here's a pointer to an architecture diagram of the Semantic 
Web: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web_Stack. The upper layers 
of the stack are not relevant for our discussion, but the two lowest 
level are: Unicode is firmly below XML.

Also, RFC 7991 was and is designed to make implementation of RFC 7997 
and others possible. It is only the later introduction of <u> (not in 
RFC 7991 as already discussed) that created problems.


> What I see is a bunch of preschooler asking the teacher to remove the lines because it is too hard to color inside them.

What I see is a preschooler claiming that all the other kids (maybe more 
grown-up) need to ask the teacher for permission every time they want to 
use a lower-case letter because that preschooler still only writes 
upper-case letters.

Regards,   Martin.