Subject: Why XML is perferable

From: [email-masked] (Jun'an Gao)
Date: Fri, 23 Feb 2001 11:43:02 +0800 (CST)

Assumption:

Total Comprehensiveness of RFCs
 = SIGMA { <interest on RFC#i of reader#j>
         * <familiarity on the presentation format of RFC#i of reader#j>
         }

for i = 1 to number of RFCs, j = 1 to number of readers.

Argument:
  Some RFCs can be well-written in simple ASCII and become
well-known, but some RFCs such as those on OSPF may be much
more vivid if written in XML. There have been quite a few
postscript RFC documents (e.g. RFC1583, J.Moy, OSPF version 2)
which serve to present ideas more comprehensibly, but XML is
likely to be much more prevelent in the near and long future.
  The personalities who are able to well undertand ASCII RFCs
might be considerably more than those who understand XML
documents well.
  Yet maybe we can safely assume that most of the people who are
interested in the Internet are, or will be in a short time, familiar
with XML documents.

Conclusion:
  The weighted sum of benefit of migrating to XML exceeds
keeping with ASCII.

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 22 Feb 2001 23:21:14 -0500

>          * <familiarity on the presentation format of RFC#i of reader#j>

Notice that the second term evaluates to:

1 if you can display it effectively.
0 if you can't display it effectively.

Now, if you're willing to give us a pointer *TODAY* to software
that will run on *every* major internet-capable platform, and do a
good-enough job of rendering XML in such a way that it is *more*
understandable than flat-ascii on *all* those platforms, then we'll
talk.

Remember that your XML displayer has to work on a PalmPilot, an
IBM3278 (24x80 text-only monitor) driven by IBM's MVS operating
system (EBCDIC-based, no less), and a DecWriter dot-matrix printer/terminal.
I've personally read ASCII-based RFCs on all those.  Oh, and you
have to be able to show value-added - that it does a BETTER job
than ASCII on those 3 devices, as well as everything else....

Repeat after me:

Everybody can display ASCII.  Until everybody can display XML, we won't
be using XML for the canonical form for RFCs.  This is *different* than
what Marshall Rose did in RFC2629 - note that that document is itself
*flat ascii* describing how to write XML and *then convert it to create
a flat ascii RFC*.

				Valdis Kletnieks
				Operating Systems Analyst
				Virginia Tech

---

From: "Wang Xianzhu" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 23 Feb 2001 13:39:37 +0800

It seems we are all discussing the presentation (display, print, read,
etc.) of the document.  But the purpose of XML is not presentation (i.e.
XML is not for display), but to make the document more meaningful.  
XML can makes series of ASCII characters meaningful to computer programs.  
With XML markups, documents can be organized and managed more effectively.  

XML documents can be rendered into any types of presentation.  If you like
to read RFCs or I-Ds in ASCII format, the web site may provide a converter
to render XML documents to pure text presentation.  There will be 
converters from XML to HTML, ms word, ps, pdf and any other types of 
presentation, suitable for any type of readers.

BTW, there are RFCs (1125, 1129, etc.) only available in ps format, and some
provided both text and ps versions.  ASCII text is not enough to describe 
information.  

I wonder if anyone can write a readable pure text version of ITU-T P.861.

Wang Xianzhu

---

From: Jorge Amodio <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 23 Feb 2001 01:33:45 -0500

> to render XML documents to pure text presentation.  There will be
                                                            ^^^^^^^
> presentation, suitable for any type of readers.

Meanwhile I stick with ASCII, which I can grep, cut & paste.

Also I don't think it will be at all practical to drive email
discussions
for ietf drafts if we have to start using XML/HTML/SGML/*ML crap.
 
> provided both text and ps versions.  ASCII text is not enough to describe

Well it worked fine for 2800+ documents and how many today ?
implementations
of tcp/ip protocols running on how many devices ?

> I wonder if anyone can write a readable pure text version of ITU-T P.861.

What P.861 {Objective quality measurement of telephone-band (300-3400
Hz) 
speech codecs} has to do with tcp/ip and rfc's ???

BTW, I hate to pay for ITU documents what are supposed to be public (I
still
remember the years old discussion when they ceased to exist available
for anon ftp)

Regards
Jorge.

---

From: [email-masked] (Claus Färber)
Date: 23 Feb 2001 17:50:00 +0100

Jun'an Gao <[email-masked]> schrieb/wrote:
> Some RFCs can be well-written in simple ASCII and become well-
> known, but some RFCs such as those on OSPF may be much more
> vivid if written in XML.

Stop right there. There can't be any documents 'written in XML'.  
XML (like SGML) is a meta language, which means that you can use  
it to define document languages ('applications' in XML/SGML  
terminology) but you can't use it to write documents.

Claus
-- 
http://www.faerber.muc.de