Subject: [rfc-i] Not so new blog post on RFC v3 XML Issues

From: "John R. Levine" <[email-masked]>
Date: 14 Dec 2020 22:21:25 -0500

> The Temporary RFC Series Project Manager (John Levine) produced a document on the RFC v3 XML Issues which I’ve put up as a blog post
> 	https://www.ietf.org/blog/rfc-v3-xml-issues/

I was particularly wondering if people had strong opinions about the 
rendering and versioning if we re-render some RFCs.

Regards,
John Levine, [email-masked], Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly

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From: "Martin Thomson" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 15 Dec 2020 14:54:30 +1100

> rendering and versioning if we re-render some RFCs.

Was it not one of the touted advantages of the v3 format that content could be regenerated?   I don't think that you should feel obliged to ask permission to do that.  And as you say date stamps on the generated files should be adequate as an indication of what has happened.

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From: Julian Reschke <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 15 Dec 2020 05:01:01 +0100

> Was it not one of the touted advantages of the v3 format that content could be regenerated?   I don't think that you should feel obliged to ask permission to do that.  And as you say date stamps on…

+1

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From: Randy Bush <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 14 Dec 2020 20:46:03 -0800

> rendering and versioning if we re-render some RFCs.

the word 'archival' springs to mind

randy

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From: Randy Bush <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 14 Dec 2020 21:39:35 -0800

> the word 'archival' springs to mind

re-rendering, if it changes formatting or pagination or layout will be
like the marketing department changing the web site and links to it from
all over the internet will no longer work correctly.

randy

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From: Julian Reschke <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 15 Dec 2020 07:06:47 +0100

>> the word 'archival' springs to mind

We never said that the XML/TXT output of v3 is the "archival" format.

> all over the internet will no longer work correctly.

Nobody is planning to break links, or to alter the content in a
semantically significant way.

Best regards, Julian

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From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 15 Dec 2020 19:49:13 +1300

We've managed fine for years with two presentation formats (plain text, and htmlized plain text) without any issues (afaik). We'll manage fine with multiple presentation formats. In both cases there's a formal definition of the archival format (was: plain
text in pure ASCII; is: XML2RFCv3). I see no issue here.

Regards
   Brian

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From: "John R. Levine" <[email-masked]>
Date: 15 Dec 2020 10:22:09 -0500

> all over the internet will no longer work correctly.

It seems to me that ship sailed several years ago.  The XML is the 
canonical version, and at least for now we're not proposing to update 
that.  The text and HTML aren't paginated at all, the layout of the HTML 
depends on your browser window and any local CSS.  I think we are smart 
enough not to gratuitously change the URLs where the documents are found.

I agree that for the most part we should leave well enough alone unless we 
see something actively wrong in the output.  The most plausible change is 
rerendering the PDFs since some of the early layout was pretty bad.

Regards,

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From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 16 Dec 2020 08:34:12 +1300

John,

I'd like to see some constructive discussion of how to fix the SVG
problem. Of course, that would need to start with an analysis of
what the problem is, beyond that fact that generating diagrams that
respect the current rules is a major pain.

Regards
   Brian

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From: Julian Reschke <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 29 Dec 2020 16:06:04 +0100

Am 04.11.2020 um 22:50 schrieb Jay Daley:
> Jay
> ...

For the sake of accuracy... The blog says:

"The author of RFC 7991 and I are slowly updating 7991bis to document
the actual vocabulary that xml2rfc accepts and that RFCs use."

The author of RFC 7991 is Paul Hoffman, and he did not participate since
autumn 2019.

I myself (author auf RFC 7749, not 7991) did participate for a few
months this year, but I have been mostly inactive since early summer as
I didn't get the impression that we were actually getting where I think
we should be going.

(In the meantime the last draft dated March has expired)

Best regards, Julian

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From: "Paul Hoffman" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 29 Dec 2020 09:35:48 -0800

On 29 Dec 2020, at 7:06, Julian Reschke wrote:

>> The Temporary RFC Series Project Manager (John Levine) produced a 
>> document on the RFC v3 XML Issues which I’ve put up as a blog post
>>

Julian is completely correct here.

> I didn't get the impression that we were actually getting where I 

And probably here.

> (In the meantime the last draft dated March has expired)

And here.

--Paul Hoffman