Re: DOCBOOK: RFC -> DocBook converter

[Dave Makower <davemak at iclick dot com>]

At 1:19 AM +1000 5/18/00, Chuck Dale wrote:
>Before I start thinking about writing a Perl script to do this I was
>wondering if this had been done before? What about more generic
>Formatted text -> DocBook conversion?

It's not as simple as it seems from one RFC.  As one of the first 
demos of a technology I helped develop called Metaphoria 
(http://www.metaphoria.net/), we created an app that presented a 
real-time view of the RFCs, parsing them on-demand into sections and 
presenting them as hyperlinked HTML with tables of contents, etc.

A few of the gotchas I can recall are:  The RFCs often have 
ASCII-based drawings, which are hard to detect.  There are also 
different ways that they express section numbers (or not at all), and 
some of them have a table of contents that you have to get past 
before you find the content.  Furthermore, some of them have errors 
and internal inconsistencies (like a section 13.1 without a section 
13, etc.)

It's probably not impossible to create a processor that would handle 
all of the RFCs, but we eventually found it to be subject to the law 
of diminishing returns.  It may be more useful to take a subset of 
the RFCs you consider "interesting", and just deal with them.

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| Dave Makower                                 <davemak@iclick.com> |
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