Subject: Re: [Rfc-markdown] RfcMarkup ToC has no links

From: Henrik Levkowetz <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2020 14:00:21 +0200

Hi Anders,

On 2020-05-30 04:43, Anders Rundgren wrote:
> sample RFC: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8759
> 
> That the page number links are gone is understandable since there
> (fortunately) is no paging anymore but removing links for headers
> seem illogical in an HTML formatted document.
> 
> I understand that the IETF want to retire the RfcMarkup format but
> since the IETF apparently still publish in this format, shouldn't
> also stay useful?

The rfcmarkup generated documents are generated from the plain text
documents published by the RFC Editor, not directly from XML.  As
such, there are a lot of heuristics involved in recognizing different
parts of the document for what they are.  In particular, the spaced
dots (periods) which are part of the ToC, are used to recognize the
entries as ToC entries, rather than section titles.

So rendering without pages and page numbers has the effect of depriving
the htmlizer of the cues it needs to generate links from the ToC.

> I'm currently in the auth48 state and the on-line xml2rfc tool
> produces ToC links for appendices(!).  Is that a bug or a feature?

Feature.

	Henrik

---

From: Anders Rundgren <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2020 14:26:38 +0200

> Hi Anders,

Hi Henrik,

I understand (technically) why you ended up with this after removing pagination but for those who write documents it surely looks like a bug.

The quick (and right?) fix would be to update the publishing system with a "deprecated" note for RfcMarkup.

If RfcMarkup is not deprecated I have a feeling we need a common plain-text/RfcMarkup generator.  The RfcMarkup system always had strange quirks with respect to links and after your explanation I finally understand why :)

Regards,
Anders