Subject: [xml2rfc] Does anyone else mark up in SGML?

From: Roger Price <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 20 Mar 2022 14:43:39 +0100 (CET)

I rewrote the xml2rfc DTD as an SGML DTD which allows markup minimisation.  I 
also changed some element names to something closer to HTML, so I write:

<s3><h3>Long Term</h3>
<p anchor="LongTerm">In the long term, ...

and program osgmlnorm (the one parser that can never be wrong) renders this as:

<section>
<name>Long Term</name>
<t anchor="LongTerm">In the long term, ...

The main advantages are much markup minimisation such as the elimination of all 
</section>, </t> and </li>, and the freedom to choose element names I can 
remember.

Does anyone else use SGML to prepare I-Ds?  I am interested in sharing 
experience, but I do not wish to encourage people to use SGML if they are not 
already familiar with it.

Roger

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From: Carsten Bormann <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 20 Mar 2022 15:34:47 +0100

On 2022-03-20, at 14:43, Roger Price <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
> Does anyone else use SGML to prepare I-Ds?  I am interested in sharing experience, but I do not wish to encourage people to use SGML if they are not already familiar with it.

The most popular authoring language for I-Ds (apart from RFCXML itself) is markdown.

For someone who has been using (and working on) SGML since the mid-1980s, supporting this evolution may be a bit surprising (at least my 1980s-self would say that).  In the 2000s, I switched to ASCIIDOC first, and had a few quite successful projects on that basis.  But in the end, ease of collaboration wins, and markdown is the leader in this space.

Grüße, Carsten