[rfc-i] RFC editing tools

[Julian Reschke]

On 2012-12-11 16:45, Stefan Santesson wrote:
> I would strongly suggest support for Ted's arguments here.
>
> I work a lot with XML and HTML but I have not tested every tool and
> product on the market.
> However, an XML schema can:
>
> - Be compiled into native data object classes, e.g. to enable parsing an
> XML file into java objects.
> - As said by Ted, validate data against the stylesheet.
> - Be transformed into virtually any presentation format using XML
> Stylesheet.
> - Be edited in semi WYSIWYG style if supported by schema and stylesheets,
> using off-the-shelf XML editors.
>
> HTML to my knowledge can't do this.

Well, HTML is trivially converted to XHTML, which is XML and has a 
schema, so I'm not sure what the problem is. There are also 
off-the-shelf HTML editors (not that I ever would use one :-).

> One more thing that we may want to consider if choosing an XML schema as
> the source format.
> Curent xml2rfc defines elements using compolex types with mixed content.
> That is, using elements where you freely can mix text and subelements.
> That is probably a good solution to make the XML Schema manual-edit
> friendly, but it makes it a great deal harder to parse the content
> programatically.
> At least with the tools I'm familiar with.

Not sure what the problem is. As far as I can tell, there's a trivial 
mapping from XML languages with mixed content to variants that do not 
have it (just wrap any text node into a container).

> I imagine that it would be possible to convert an XML document according
> to the xml2rfc schema to an XML schema that isn't using mixed content.
> This might be a consideration for a source format where you could add info
> to an xml2rfc doc to capture some of the data currently missing for
> allowing transformation to all presentations formats, including back to
> xml2rfc if necessary.
> ...

Example?

Best regards, Julian