[rfc-i] RFC Heresies

[Julian Reschke]

On 2012-03-28 07:23, Tim Bray wrote:
> ...
> 2. No, we don’t need metadata
>
> YAGNI.  Really.  Requiring metadata significantly increases the
> cognitive burden on authors without conferring any particular benefit
> on readers.  This argument has been going on for years and the
> proponents of metadata always talk about the magical wonderful things
> that will become possible once everything’s tagged and structured, and
> we never get to eat that cake. RDF died for a reason. The Semantic Web
> oops I mean “linked data” is languishing for a reason.  I find the
> existing corpus of RFCs to be nicely searchable as it stands.
> ...

Things I do with "metadata" in xml2rfc on a regular basis:

- extract artwork using a specific language (DTD, ABNF, ...)

- check references against publication databases (RFCs, IDs, W3C RECs 
and WDs)

- analyze intra-document dependencies (sections referring to other sections)

- analyze inter-document dependencies

- extract information of protocol elements being defined, in order to 
have IANA registration sections in sync

Not sure whether this falls into what thought of when saying "metadata".

Best regards, Julian