Re: Tools to revive an old-ish TR and convert it to an RFC?

Norman Walsh schrieb:
> / Thomas Roessler <tlr@w3.org> was heard to say:
> | - What's the general wisdom in terms of converting an existing TR
> |   from HTML to xmlspec -- to what extent is that even deemed
> |   feasible with tools (i.e., how much information loss is there in
> |   the conversion from xmlspec to html), are there tools that go part
> |   of the way, or would some poor editor be in for a rather
> |   terrifying manual conversion job?
> |
> |   (The obvious alternative would be to edit the HTML directly.)
> 
> A little XSLT would no doubt take you a good deal of the way, though
> I'm not aware of any existing XSLT for that purpose.
> 
> | - Assuming we'd go for xmlspec, is there any existing tooling that
> |   would lend itself to easily producing an RFC out of this, e.g. by
> |   transforming xmlspec into the format defined in the latest
> |   draft-mrose-writing-rfcs [2], and then using the tools that are
> |   common in the IETF?
> 
> The XML for RFCs is ... idiosyncratic. I think it'd be a challenge
> to go from anything even moderately complicated to that format
> cleanly.

Well, most of the time it would need to strip things out. Remember it's 
been designed to produce the ASCII test documents the RFC Editor likes 
to publish.

> I might, in your shoes, be tempted to author in the RFC markup and
> then convert that into W3C HTML. Not that that's going to be easy
> either, given the limitations of the RFC vocabulary.
> 
> | 1. http://www.w3.org/2007/xmlsec/
> | 2. http://xml.resource.org/authoring/draft-mrose-writing-rfcs.html

I'm personally quite happy with the xml2rfc grammar, although of course 
a few extensions make things nicer (see 
<http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/rfc2629xslt/rfc2629xslt.html#extensions>). 
I do have a proof-of-concept XSLT for xml2rfc->xmlspec, let me know if 
you're interested...

Best regards, Julian

Received on Monday, 16 April 2007 13:40:05 UTC