Re: [xml2rfc] Differentiating prepped from unprepared documents

["John R. Levine" <[e-mail]>]

On Wed, 22 Jun 2022, Jay Daley wrote:
> Julian has suggested that we use a namespace extension for the prepped grammar.  That would mean that the prep tool would add a namespace attribute, such as xmlns:prep="http://www.rfc-editor.org/prep-namespace", to the <rfc> element and then all markup inserted by the tool would be prefixed with "prep" ("prep" is just an example prefix) such as the <prep:toc …> element and "prep:pn" attributes.  There would still only be one grammar file (i.e. rfcXXXX.rnc) but that would be amended to specify the namespace of each element/attribute.
> Personally, I think this is the best way forward given where we are now, though I would have preferred us to have started differently.  Ideally we would have more clearly differentiated between I-Ds and RFCs in the authoring format to match the distinction that is so apparent in how these documents are used.  That would mean having two different grammar files, one for I-Ds with a root element <i-d> and one for RFCs with a root element of <rfc>, and with the prep tool converting between the two.  However, moving to that now seems excessive.

I agree.  In the next week or two I'll be looking at RFC 7998 and the 
xml2rfc docs to put together a proposal

> The only practical downside of the namespace solution is that it constricts I-D grammar to always being a subset of RFC grammar (as the latter is implemented by an extension) and so it makes it messy to implement such things as including annotations in the grammar that are only for use in I-Ds and not RFCs.

I suppose we could add an I-D namespace if that turned out to be 
important.

Regards,
John Levine, [e-mail], Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
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