[rfc-i] Comments on draft-hildebrand-html-rfc-2012-07-07 and draft-hoffman-rfcformat-canon-others-03

[Yoav Nir]

On Jul 30, 2012, at 6:20 PM, Joe Hildebrand (jhildebr) wrote:

> On 7/30/12 6:08 PM, "Yoav Nir" <ynir at checkpoint.com> wrote:
> 
> 
>> For example, looking at the HTML for the sample draft, you can see that
>> the section numbers are actually written inside the HTML file, for
>> example;
>> 
>> What is to stop anyone from creating two sections numbered 1.3?  If you
>> insert a section, you'd have to renumber all the following sections.
>> Sure, I can have a Word template or even the xml2rfc program generate
>> them, and that's fine, but I think the fact that editing this is hard
>> makes it a poorer choice than xml2rfc.
> 
> It's not like I typed in the TOC and all of the section numbers by hand.
> There's a tool that fixes all of that up.  Source code on github, as
> linked to before.  Here's the actual code:
> 
> https://github.com/IETF-Formatters/html-rfc/blob/master/nits/toc.js
> 
> 
> This is more like what you actually edit:
> 
> https://github.com/IETF-Formatters/html-rfc/blob/master/data/template.html
> 
> 
> Which is not radically different from xml2rfc, and has the benefit that
> your existing intuition about the meaning of HTML tags is useful to you.
> 
> Finally, I expect that before publication, the RFC editor would ensure
> that the tooling had been run, so that all of the section numbers are
> correct.

I see that section headings are "h2" while subsections are "h3". What if you mix them up?  You're always going to have the ability to do formatting wrong, because HTML is a presentation format. You can get them wrong. XML2RFC doesn't allow this.

Yoav