[rfc-i] RFC editing tools

[Joe Hildebrand (jhildebr)]

On 12/7/12 12:16 PM, "Nico Williams" <nico at cryptonector.com> wrote:

>On Fri, Dec 7, 2012 at 2:09 PM, Ted Lemon <mellon at fugue.com> wrote:
>> I'm not specifically advocating XML‹I'd be perfectly happy with LISP
>>sexprs.   But I suspect XML is a more practical choice.   I don't think
>>HTML is a practical choice.
>
>I am quite fond of saying that there's been nothing new under the sun
>in data encoding/representation since S-expressions.  But there is one
>thing XML does *really* well: tools like XSLT/XPath/XQuery, ... are
>like LISP macros/functions like destructuring-bind, but on steroids,
>taken to the nth, and well thought out.  This is valuable.  XSLT in
>particular is.

For the XPath stuff, jQuery-style CSS selectors work really well.  The
prototype's bin/rfcq script make those really easy to execute on the
command line.

>At least three of the available I-D/RFC authoring/editing solutions
>(including my lyx2rfc) depend XSLT.  I would not want to lose this, so
>for me XML is it.  XHTML might suffice, but not HTML -- it has to be
>XML, and all metadata needs to be available programmatically and
>unambiguously.  The only exception I'd make here is for formats which
>can losslessly be converted to XML in some schema.

The prototype output is well-formed XML.  I didn't declare it as XHTML in
order to track a little closer to where I think the industry is going with
HTML5.  In fact, I generated the XML2RFC version of the draft from the
original HTML version with XSLT.

-- 
Joe Hildebrand