On Thu, Jan 12, 2006 at 04:22:53PM -0800, Dave Crocker wrote: > Maintaining xml2rfc is going to far less fragile than maintaining nroff. > Nroff has no current industry penetration. XML has quite a lot.
I'd be cautious here. Equating the XML communities and the xml2rfc communities is not correct. There's an important distinction between the XML meta-language and the xml2rfc language and its associated formatting tools. Lots of places express languages in XML DTDs and use one of the many XML parsers in their tools to parse those DTDs. That widespread adoption of the meta-language and the resultant support for XML parsing libraries in a large number of implementation languages and environments does simplify the specification of the xml2rfc language and the generation and maintenance of the xml2rfc program. However, the actual community of that uses the XML-based RFC authoring tools is a subset of the contributors to the IETF; the maintainers of the xml2rfc formatter(s) are a subset of that. That smaller community is the one that is needed to keep a working xml2rfc language and formatting program available to the IETF. It's by no means obvious to me that xml2rfc has reached a critical mass of developers and users, nor that it will necessarily do so organically. A financial IETF commitment to the system might mitigate that problem, though I recognize the trolls under *that* bridge. (Please do not take this is not a slap at the rfc2xml developers. I use the program and I like the program.) All that said, I do think that an XML-based encoding of RFC contents is a good idea (seriously - that's not just lip service), but let's assess the situation with open eyes. If we're talking about changing formats from ASCII -> rfc2xml, Bob's concerns about the long-term viability of the xml2rfc formatting program(s) do need to be addressed, and the assertion that there's a lot of interest and activity in XML doesn't do so adequately. IMHO. -- Ted Faber http://www.isi.edu/~faber PGP: http://www.isi.edu/~faber/pubkeys.asc Unexpected attachment on this mail? See http://www.isi.edu/~faber/FAQ.html#SIG
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