Re: [xml2rfc] Insufficiency of txt format

[John Levine <[e-mail]>]

In article <[e-mail]>,
Paul Kyzivat  <[e-mail]> wrote:
>Of more concern, AFAIK the only reasonable diff tools work on the txt 
>version. IIRC there was once talk of creating a diff tool that worked on 
>the xml, but I haven't heard of any such thing materialized. 

Jim Schaad was working on it, but the stuff he wrote wasn't close to done.

>I think 
>that would present great challenges, especially if the xml is 
>aesthetically revised while preserving the look. And I would still want 
>to see the diff results in side-by-side form. Also that won't work when 
>one of the versions being diffed predates v3 xml.

I agree there's no plausible way to do XML diffs on documents using
different XML vocabularies, but eventually v2 will die out. Our
tooling is a problem and we underestimated what we'd need beyond
xml2rfc to create a productive v3 xml environment.

>The only way I have seen to reasonably manage differences in documents 
>with fancier formatting is with change history, such as provided by 
>MSWord. We clearly don't have that with v3 xml.

Well, we do if we store them in github but that's its own can of worms.

R's,
John
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