Early Review of draft-hoffman-xml2rfc-04
review-hoffman-xml2rfc-04-genart-early-halpern-2016-11-12-00

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Review
review-hoffman-xml2rfc-04-genart-early-halpern-2016-11-12

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Document: draft-hoffman-xml2rfc-04
    The 'XML2RFC' version 3 Vocabulary
Reviewer: Joel M. Halpern

Summary: This review focuses on readability rather than on XML details.
    In that light, this document could use some improvement.

Major issues:


    The explanation in section 1.1 seems to bounce from topic to topic 


losing the reader repeatedly.  The explanation of the intended 


compatibility before the list of changes is confusing.  Either there are 


v2 features that don't work, or all v2 works, with some deprecated.


    It seems that discussion of the RFC Editor handling of v2 documents 


and this grammar belongs somewhere other than the definition of the 


grammar.  I was surprised to find discussion of canonical RFCs here. 


That set of text was probably the most confusing aspect of section 1.1.






    In section 2.5.6 on the 'type' attribute of the <artwork> element, 


it talks about the processor.  Since that appears to be a reference to 


the internal RFC Editor processor, rather than to the tools readers or 


writers will use, I would think that confusing text should be removed. 


(The processor will throw errors in certain cases, but consumers should 


not throw errors in any text cases?)





Minor issues:


    The question of how the grammar is generated is not a substantive 


difference between v2 and v3, and tells the reader nothing about what 


will follow.  If it should be mentioned at all, it would seem better in 


some other section of the document than 1.1






    Does <artwork> section 2.5 still need to be enclosed in the cdata 


construct to actually have the formatting preserved?  If so, should 


section 2.5 say that?  (Or am I just confused and issuing useless 


incantations in my current docs?)






    In section 2.5, and probably elsewhere, some of the attributes are 


"ought to be avoided", and one is "Deprecated".  The author apparently 


means something specific by "ought to be avoided", but this reader is 


confused.






    In section 2.22.6 on the suppress-title attribute for the <figure> 


element, the text is either confusing or incorrect.  THe text talks 


about figures that have anchor attributes getting autogenerated titles. 


 And that if one wants to suppress that, one should set this to 


"false".  It seems pretty odd that setting suppress to false (which is 


the default) would suppress the autogenerated title.  If it will, the 


attribute name is just wrong.  More likely, you suppress the 


auto-generated title by setting this attribute to "true".



    This also seems to occur in 2.49.4 in the suppress-title for <table>.



    Since <format> is defined (in section 2.23) it ought to be lsited 


as part of the valid content model for <reference> in section 2.40.






   In section 2.40 on <reference>, it might be useful to explain what 


will happen with the short form references.  It seems that how they get 


rendered will depend upon whether the processing engine has the ability 


to find additional data to use?  Or maybe not?






    Also, since <reference> allows <front>, <innerRefContent>, ... it 


seems that <reference> has a content model.  So I presume it is an error 


for it to say that it does not have a content model?






   I would have expected the values of the 'series' attribute of the 


<reference> element to be described in the attribute section (2.40.3) 


rather than in the base element section (2.40).





Nits/editorial comments:


    It would be nice if the deprecated elements were marked as 


deprecated both in their definition and in the places where they can 


appear.  (for example, marking <facsimile> as deprecated in the content 


model listing for <address>).  On the other hand, that may be a pain to 


get right.






    In the description of <date> in section 2.15, the text correctly 


notes that it can appear either as a document date or as a reference 


date.  And then correctly notes that the only legal parent for this is 


<front>.  Is there any way to remind the reader that <front> is used in 


long form references?