Re: [xml-dev] XML for RFCs

[Miloslav Nic <nicmila@systinet.com>]

On Mon, 24 Feb 2003, Alaric B. Snell wrote:


I have marked up with my own format all RFC's
http://zvon.org/tmRFC/RFC_share/Output/index.html

 (it took me a year and the format is heavily optimized to enable mark up 
of plain  texts). I keep the repository up to date.

I could not use  RFC-2629:
Writing I-Ds and RFCs using XML
http://zvon.org/tmRFC/RFC2629/Output/index.html

 as it would take me several times longer to 
accomplish the task.


"Individually trivial" is not the right word if you have to mark-up 3000+ 
documents and to stay at least partially sane ;)



> 
> A few people have been messing about with XML-ising RFCs.
> 
> There used to be a company (which I can no longer find; XML and RFC gets far 
> too many matches in Google) who were paying students to mark up RFCs into 
> their XML structure.
> 
> There have been a few efforts to do basic markup of RFCs in XML, but too many 
> of them still just rely on large <pre> - style sections for the diagrams and 
> so on.
> 
> What would be ideal is to have something like DocBook for RFCs, that can be 
> rendered into the standard plain text style with a combination of XSLT and 
> other software, but can also be put into HTML and other formats.
> 
> And the real killer app would be if the ABNF and packet diagrams had a formal 
> notation in the XML, making it possible for protocol analyser tools like 
> Ethereal and tcpdump to take RFCs as input and automatically generate parsers 
> for IETF protocols!
> 
> Particularly useful in the Assigned Numbers RFCs.
> 
> There are three prongs to this work:
> 
> 1) Making a decent DTD that handles all the different types of tables and 
> diagrams found in RFCs, or at least the important ones; diagrams that are 
> purely for illustration would have less priority than diagrams that could be 
> used to automatically drive conformance test systems and derive skeleton 
> implementations.
> 
> 2) Marking up existing RFCs (time consuming, but individually trivial)
> 
> 3) Getting the IETF interested in publishing new RFCs in this format for the 
> greater good of humanity
> 
> Comments?
> 
> ABS
> 
> 

-- 
******************************************
<firstName> Miloslav </firstName>
<surname>   Nic      </surname>

<mail>    nicmila@systinet.com    </mail>
<support> http://www.zvon.org  </support>