| Network Working Group | R. Tse |
| Internet-Draft | N. Nicholas |
| Intended status: Informational | J. Lau |
| Expires: May 24, 2018 | P. Brasolin |
| Ribose | |
| November 20, 2017 |
Writing Internet-Drafts And RFCs In AsciiDoc (AsciiRFC)
draft-ribose-asciirfc-00
This document describes the AsciiDoc syntax extension called AsciiRFC designed for authoring IETF Internet-Drafts and RFCs.
AsciiDoc is a human readable document markup language which affords more granular control over markup than comparable schemes such as Markdown.
The AsciiRFC syntax is designed to allow the author to entirely focus on text, providing the full power of the resulting XML RFC through the AsciiDoc language, while abstracting away the need to manually edit XML, including references.
This document itself was written and generated into XML RFC v2 (RFC7749) and XML RFC v3 (RFC7991) directly through asciidoctor-rfc, an AsciiRFC generator.
This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.
Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet-Drafts is at https://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.
Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."
This Internet-Draft will expire on May 24, 2018.
Copyright (c) 2017 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document authors. All rights reserved.
This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (https://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document. Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as described in the Simplified BSD License.
As specified in [RFC7990], the IETF intends for the canonical format of RFCs to transition from plain-text ASCII to RFC XML v3 [RFC7991]. While plain-text will continue to be accepted from authors by the IETF, at least in the short- to medium-term, XML will be preferred for submission, and any plain-text submissions will need to be converted to RFC XML v3.
The transition to RFC XML v3 places added onus on authors to generate compliant XML. This need is already met for RFC XML v2 [RFC7749] by tools such as MMark and Kramdown, both based on the popular Markdown markup language [RFC7763] [RFC7764].
Asciidoctor is an alternative markup language to Markdown, with features that make it attractive as a markup language for RFC with XML output.
Section 1.2 of [RFC7764] famously states that "there is no such thing as "invalid" Markdown, there is no standard demanding adherence to the Markdown syntax, and there is no governing body that guides or impedes its development." While there are contexts where that lack of rigour is helpful, the authoring of RFCs does have a standard and a governing body, and there is such a thing as invalid RFC XML. A more rigorous counterpart to Markdown, which still preserves its basic approach to formatting, is useful in generating RFC XML that encompasses a fuller subset of the specification, and preempting malformed RFC XML output.
As with Markdown, there is a wide range of tools that can render Asciidoctor; so Asciidoctor drafts of RFC documents can be previewed and accessed without depending on the RFC tools ecosystem. Our porting of RFC XML to Asciidoctor has aimed to ensure that, as much as possible, the Asciidoctor being used for RFC is generic Asciidoctor, which can be processed by Asciidoctor tools in general. (The only exception to this as an add-on is the optional bibliography module, which allows bibliographies to be assembled on the fly based on citations in a document.)
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in [RFC2119].
TODO.
The syntax of Asciidoctor is presented in the Asciidoctor user manual.
Asciidoctor consists of:
Inline markup includes:
The Asciidoctor document structure aligns with the RFC XML v2 and v3 structure. In the following, v3 equivalences are given:
Full details of the mapping of Asciidoctor elements to RFC XML v2 and v3 elements, and of how to convert Asciidoctor documents to RFC XML, are given in <https://github.com/riboseinc/asciidoctor-rfc/blob/master/README.adoc>. The following gives an overview of how to create an RFC XML document in Asciidoctor, with some pitfalls to be aware of. Illustrations are in RFC XML v3, although the converter deals with both versions of RFC XML.
The header gives the document title, followed by an optional author attribution, and a series of document attributes, with no carriage return breaks.
For example:
= Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers David Waitzman <dwaitzman@BBN.COM> :doctype: internet-draft :abbrev: IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers :obsoletes: 10, 120 :updates: 2010, 2120 :status: informational :name: internet-draft-avian-transmission-00 :ipr: trust200902 :area: Internet :workgroup: Network Working Group :keyword: avians, datagrams :revdate: 1990-04-01T00:00:00Z :organization: BBN STC :phone: (617) 873-4323 :uri: http://bbn.com :street: 10 Moulton Street :city: Cambridge :code: MA 02238 :rfcedstyle: yes :text-list-symbols: yes :rfc2629xslt: true
The document attributes are used to populate rfc attributes, front elements, and document-level processing instructions.
The foregoing Asciidoc renders into RFC XML v3 as:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="US-ASCII"?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="rfc2629.xslt"?>
<!DOCTYPE rfc SYSTEM "rfc2629.dtd">
<?rfc rfcedstyle="yes"?>
<?rfc text-list-symbols="yes"?>
<?rfc strict="yes"?>
<?rfc compact="yes"?>
<?rfc subcompact="no"?>
<?rfc toc="yes"?>
<?rfc tocdepth="4"?>
<?rfc symrefs="yes"?>
<?rfc sortrefs="yes"?>
<rfc ipr="trust200902" obsoletes="10, 120" updates="2010, 2120"
submissiontype="IETF" preptime="2017-11-18T01:52:35Z" version="3">
<front>
<title abbrev="IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers">
A Standard for the Transmission of IP
Datagrams on Avian Carriers
</title>
<seriesinfo name="Internet-Draft" status="informational"
stream="IETF" value="internet-draft-avian-transmission-00" />
<author fullname="David Waitzman" surname="Waitzman">
<organization>BBN STC</organization>
<address>
<postal>
<street>10 Moulton Street</street>
<city>Cambridge</city>
<code>MA 02238</code>
</postal>
<phone>(617) 873-4323</phone>
<email>dwaitzman@BBN.COM</email>
<uri>http://bbn.com</uri>
</address>
</author>
<date day="1" month="April" year="1990" />
<area>Internet</area>
<workgroup>Network Working Group</workgroup>
<keyword>avians</keyword>
<keyword>datagrams</keyword>
Details of a second, third etc. author, including their organization and contact details, are provided by suffixing the author attribute with _2, _3 etc.:
John Doe Horton <john.doe@email.com>; Billy Bob Thornton <billy.thornton@email.com> :fullname: John Doe Horton :lastname: Horton :forename_initials: J. D. :role: editor :organization: Ribose :fax: 555 5555 :email: john.doe@email.com :uri: http://example.com :phone: 555 5655 :street: 57 Mt Pleasant St :city: Dullsville :region: NSW :country: Australia :code: 3333 :fullname_2: Billy Bob Thornton :lastname_2: Thornton :forename_initials_2: B. B. :role_2: editor :organization_2: IBM :fax_2: 555 6666 :email_2: billy.thornton@email.com :uri_2: http://ibm.com :phone_2: 555 6655 :street_2: 67 Mt Pleasant St :city_2: Dulltown :region_2: VIC :country_2: UK :code_2: 44444
The initial author attribution in Asciidoctor, e.g. John Doe Horton<john.doe@email.com>; Billy Bob Thornton <billy.thornton@email.com> in the example above, expects a strict format of First Name, zero or more Middle Names, Last name, and cannot process honorifics like "Dr" or suffixes like "Jr". Name attributes with any degree of complexity should be overriden by using the :fullname: and :lastname: attributes. The :forename_initials: replaces the built-in :initials: attribute (which includes the surname initial), and is not automatically populated from the name attribution.
The preamble in Asciidoctor is the text between the end of the document header (which terminates with a blank line) and the first section of text. Any paragraphs of text in the preamble are treated as an abstract, and may optionally be tagged with the abstract style attribute. Any notes in the preamble are treated as a note element. For example:
= A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers David Waitzman <dwaitzman@BBN.COM> :doctype: internet-draft :abbrev: IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers :status: informational :name: internet-draft-avian-transmission-00 Preamble content. More Preamble content. NOTE: This is a note. [NOTE] .Title of Note ==== This is another note. ====
<rfc submissionType="IETF" prepTime="2017-11-18T02:55:47Z" version="3">
<front>
<title abbrev="IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers">
A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers
</title>
<seriesInfo name="Internet-Draft" status="informational" stream="IETF"
value="internet-draft-avian-transmission-00"/>
<author fullname="David Waitzman" surname="Waitzman">
<address>
<email>dwaitzman@BBN.COM</email>
</address>
</author>
<date day="18" month="November" year="2017"/>
<abstract><t>Preamble content.</t>
<t>More Preamble content.</t>
</abstract>
<note>
<t>This is a note.</t>
</note>
<note>
<name>Title of Note</name>
<t>This is another note.</t>
</note>
</front>
Section headers are given with a sequence of =, the number of = giving the header level. Section numbering is toggled with the in-document attribute :sectnums: (on), :sectnums!: (off)
:sectnums: [toc=exclude] == Section 1 Para 1 === Subsection 1.1 Para 1a :sectnums!: [toc=default] === Subsection 1.2 Para 2 ==== Subsection 1.2.1 Para 3
<section anchor="_section_1" toc="exclude" numbered="true">
<name>Section 1</name>
<t>Para 1</t>
<section anchor="_subsection_1_1" numbered="true">
<name>Subsection 1.1</name>
<t>Para 1a</t>
</section>
<section anchor="_subsection_1_2" toc="default" numbered="false">
<name>Subsection 1.2</name>
<t>Para 2</t>
<section anchor="_subsection_1_2_1" numbered="false">
<name>Subsection 1.2.1</name>
<t>Para 3</t>
</section>
</section>
</section>
AsciiDoc Examples (corresponding to RFC XML figures), source code listings, and literals (preformatted text) are all delimited blocks. Listings and literals can occur nested within examples. If an Asciidoctor listing or literal occurs outside of an example, the RFC XML converter will supply the surrounding figure element:
.Figure 1
====
.figure1.txt
....
Figures are only permitted to contain listings
(sourcecode), images (artwork), or literal (artwork)
....
[source,ruby]
----
def listing(node)
result = []
if node.parent.context != :example
result << "<figure>"
end
end
----
====
<figure>
<name>Figure 1</name>
<artwork type="ascii-art" name="figure1.txt">
Figures are only permitted to contain listings
(sourcecode), images (artwork), or literal (artwork)
</artwork>
<sourcecode type="ruby">
def listing(node)
result = []
if node.parent.context != :example
result << "<figure>"
end
end
</sourcecode>
</figure>
Asciidoctor supports ordered, unordered, and definition lists. Indentation of ordered and unordered lists is indicated by repeating the list item prefix (* and . respectively.) List attributes specify the type of symbol used for ordered lists:
[loweralpha] . First . Second [upperalpha] .. Third .. Fourth . Fifth . Sixth
<ol anchor="id" type="a">
<li>First</li>
<li>
<t>Second</t>
<ol type="A">
<li>Third</li>
<li>Fourth</li>
</ol>
</li>
<li>Fifth</li>
<li>Sixth</li>
</ol>
A list item by default spans a single paragraph. A following paragraph or other block element can be appended to the current list item by prefixing it with + in a separate line (Asciidoc list continuation.)
Notes:: Note 1. + Note 2. + Note 3.
<dl>
<dt>Notes</dt>
<dd>
<t>Note 1.</t>
<t>Note 2.</t>
<t>Note 3.</t>
</dd>
</dl>
List continuations can also be embed to populate a list item with a sequence of blocks as a unit (in an Asciidoc open block):
* List Entry 1 * List Entry 2 + -- Note 2. .... Literal .... Note 3. --
<ul>
<li>List Entry 1</li>
<li>
<t>
List Entry 2
</t>
<t>
Note 2.
</t>
<figure>
<artwork type="ascii-art">
Literal
</artwork>
</figure>
<t>
Note 3.
</t>
</li>
</ul>
Asciidoctor considers paragraphs to be the basic level of blocks, and does not permit lists to be nested within them: text after a list is considered to be a new paragraph. So markup like the following cannot be generated via Asciidoctor:
<t>
This is the start of a paragraph.
<ul>
<li>List Entry 1</li>
<li>
<t>List Entry 2</t>
<t>Note 2.</t>
<figure>
<artwork type="ascii-art">
Literal
</artwork>
</figure>
<t>Note 3.</t>
</li>
</ul>
Asciidoctor supports blockquotes and quotations of verse; its block quotations permit arbitrary levels of quote nesting. RFC XML v3 only supports one level of blockquotes. RFC XML v3 does not support line breaks outside of tables, so verse quotations are converted to prose.
[quote,attribution="Monty Python",citetitle="http://foo.bar"] ____ Dennis: Come and see the violence inherent in the system. Help! Help! I'm being repressed! King Arthur: Bloody peasant! Dennis: Oh, what a giveaway! * Did you hear that? * Did you hear that, eh? * That's what I'm on about! ** Did you see him repressing me? ** You saw him, Didn't you? ____
<blockquote quotedfrom="Monty Python" cite="http://foo.bar">
<t>Dennis: Come and see the violence inherent in the system.
Help! Help! I’m being repressed!</t>
<t>King Arthur: Bloody peasant!</t>
<t>Dennis: Oh, what a giveaway!</t>
<ul>
<li>Did you hear that?</li>
<li>Did you hear that, eh?</li>
<li>
<t>That’s what I’m on about!</t>
<ul>
<li>Did you see him repressing me?</li>
<li>You saw him, Didn’t you?</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
Asciidoctor supports a range of "admonitions", including notes, warnings, and tips. They are indicated by a paragraph prefix (e.g. WARNING:), or as a block with an admonition style attribute. All admonitions are converted to note elements in the document preamble, and cref documents in the main document. RFC XML v3 also supports asides (Asciidoctor sidebars):
== Section 1 [NOTE,source=GBS] .Note Title ==== Any admonition inside the body of the text is a comment. ==== **** Sidebar Another sidebar * This is a list .... And this is ascii-art .... ****
<section anchor="_section_1" numbered="false">
<name>Section 1</name>
<t>
<cref display="true" source="GBS">
Any admonition inside the body of the text is a comment.
</cref>
</t>
<aside>
<t>Sidebar</t>
<t>Another sidebar</t>
<ul>
<li>This is a list</li>
</ul>
<figure>
<artwork type="ascii-art">
And this is ascii-art
</artwork>
</figure>
</aside>
Note that no inline formatting is permitted in RFC XML v2, and it is stripped for v2 by the converter.
Because paragraphs in Asciidoctor cannot contain any other blocks, a comment at the end of a paragraph is treated as a new block. In the document converter, any such comments are moved inside the preceding RFC XML paragraph; if the comment is at the start of a section, as in the example above, it is wrapped inside a paragraph.
While Asciidoctor has comments proper, notated with initial //, they are ignore by the document converter, so they will not appear as XML comments in the converter output.
Asciidoctor tables, like RFC XML v3, support distinct table heads, bodies and feet, cells spanning multiple rows and columns, and horizontal alignment. The larger range of formatting options available in RFC XML v2 is also supported.
.Table Title |=== |head | head h|header cell | body cell | | body cell 2+| colspan of 2 .2+|rowspan of 2 | cell |cell ^|centre aligned cell | cell <|left aligned cell | cell >|right aligned cell | cell |foot | foot |===
<table>
<name>Table Title</name>
<thead>
<tr>
<th align="left">head</th>
<th align="left">head</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr>
<th align="left">header cell</th>
<td align="left">body cell</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="left"></td>
<td align="left">body cell</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td colspan="2" align="left">colspan of 2</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td rowspan="2" align="left">rowspan of 2</td>
<td align="left">cell</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="left">cell</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="center">centre aligned cell</td>
<td align="left">cell</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="left">left aligned cell</td>
<td align="left">cell</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="right">right aligned cell</td>
<td align="left">cell</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
<tfoot>
<tr>
<td align="left">foot</td>
<td align="left">foot</td>
</tr>
</tfoot>
</table>
Neither version of RFC XML is as expressive in its table structure as Asciidoctor; RFC XML for example does not permit blocks within table cells.
Like RFC XML v3, Asciidoctor supports italics, boldface, monospace, subscripts and superscripts:
_Text_ *Text* `Text` ^Superscript^ ~Subscript~
<t><em>Text</em> <strong>Text</strong> <tt>Text</tt> <sup>Superscript</sup> <sub>Subscript</sub></t>
RFC XML v3 also supports tagging of BCP14 keywords [RFC2119]; this is done in Asciidoctor either by tagging them with a custom formatting span (bcp14#mustnot#), or by converting by default BCP14 boldface all-caps words:
This [bcp14]#must not# stand This *MUST NOT* stand
<t>This <bcp14>MUST NOT</bcp14> stand</t> <t>This <bcp14>MUST NOT</bcp14> stand</t>
Any spans of BCP14 text delimited by inline formatting delimiters needs to be contained within a single line of text; the Asciidoctor API breaks up formatting spans across line breaks.
Formatting delimiters like * can be escaped with backslash; double formatting delimiters, like <spanx style="strong"> and __, need to be escaped with double backslash(\\</spanx>). Escaping delimiters is not always reliable, and for double delimiters it is preferable to use HTML entities (**), or attribute references:
:dblast: **
`{dblast}`
Common URL formats are recognised automatically as hyperlinks, and are rendered as such; any hyperlinked text is appended after the hyperlink in square brackets:
http://example.com/[linktext]
<t><eref target="http://example.com/">linktext</eref></t>
To prevent hyperlinking of a URL, prefix it with a backslash.
Anchors for crossreferences are notated as [[…]] or [#…]. Anchors can be inserted on their own line in front of most blocks. Asciidoctor supports anchors in a much wider range of contexts than is supported than RFC XML v3 (let alone v2); anchors that are not supported for that version of RFC XML are simply ignored by the converter. Note that anchors in RFC XML are constrained to the format [A-Za-z_:][[A-Za-z0-9_:.-]*.
Cross-references to anchors are notated as <…>; cross-references with custom text as <reference,text>. Asciidoctor does not otherwise support attributes on cross-references, but the converter extracts format information from templated text within cross-references: format=x:text populates the xref@format attribute, while a section number followed by one of the words of, parens, bare, text is treated as a relref reference to an external document.
[[crossreference]] == Section 1 == Section 2 See <<crossreference>>. == Section 3 See <<crossreference,text>> == Section 4 See <<crossreference,format=counter: text>> == Section 5 See <<crossreference,format=title>> See <<crossreference,1.3 of>> <<crossreference,1.4 comma: text>> <<crossreference#fragment1,2.5.3 parens>> <<crossreference#fragment2,6.2a bare: text>>
<section anchor="crossreference" numbered="false">
<name>Section 1</name>
</section>
<section anchor="_section_2" numbered="false">
<name>Section 2</name>
<t>
See
<xref target="crossreference">
</xref>.
</t>
</section>
<section anchor="_section_3" numbered="false">
<name>Section 3</name>
<t>
See
<xref target="crossreference">
text
</xref>
</t>
</section>
<section anchor="_section_4" numbered="false">
<name>Section 4</name>
<t>
See
<xref format="counter" target="crossreference">
text
</xref>
</t>
</section>
<section anchor="_section_5" numbered="false">
<name>
Section 5
</name>
<t>
See
<xref format="title" target="crossreference" />
</t>
<t>
See
<relref section="1.3" displayformat="of"
target="crossreference" />
<relref section="1.4" displayformat="comma"
target="crossreference">
text
</relref>
<relref relative="fragment1" section="2.5.3"
displayformat="parens" target="crossreference" />
<relref relative="fragment2" section="6.2a"
displayformat="bare" target="crossreference">
text
</relref>
</t>
</section>
The Asciidoctor "include" directive is used to include external files in a master Asciidoctor document. The directive is capable of sophisticated document merging, including adjusting the heading levels of the included text, selecting text within specified tags or line numbers to be included, and adjusting the indentation of code snippets in merged text:
\include::path[ leveloffset=_offset_, lines=_ranges_, tag(s)=_name(s)_, indent=_depth_ ]
XML accepted the full range of characters in the world’s languages through UTF-8 character encoding, and one of the motivations for the move from plain text to RFC XML has been to allow non-ASCII characters to be included in RFCs. However, current RFC XML v2 tools still do not support UTF-8, and other tool support for UTF-8 also remains patchy. Out of an abundance of caution, the RFC XML converter uses US-ASCII for its character encoding, and renders any non-ASCII characters as entities.
The converter accepts HTML entities in Asciidoctor, even though they are not part of the XML specification; HTML entities such as feature in examples of RFC XML provided by the IETF. In order to prevent dependence of the XML output from extraneous entity definitions, any such entities are rendered in the XML as decimal character entities.
Asciidoctor has a simple encoding of bibliographies, but it is not adequate for the complexity of bibliographic markup supported in RFC XML. RFC documents overwhelmingly cite other RFC documents, and canonical RFC XML bibliographic entries are available at <http://xml.resource.org/public/rfc/bibxml/> ; so it would be inefficient to encode those entries in Asciidoctor, only to have them converted back to RFC XML.
The converter provides two means of incorporating bibliographies into RFC documents authored in Asciidoctor:
In either case, the RFC XML needs to be well-formed; missing closing tags can lead to erratic behaviour in the converter.
In the first, bibliographic citations are handled like all other cross-references. The bibliographic entries for normative and informative references are given in the Asciidoctor as passthrough blocks, which contain the raw RFC XML for all references; document conversion leaves the raw RFC XML in place. This approach requires authors to maintain the normative and informative bibliographies within the document, to update them as citations are added and removed, and to sort them manually.
Some datagram padding may be needed.<<RFC7253>>
[bibliography]
== Normative References
++++
<reference anchor='RFC7253'
target='https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7253'>
<front>
<title>Guidelines for Writing an IANA Considerations
Section in RFCs</title>
<author initials="T." surname="Krovetz">
<organization>Sacramento State</organization>
</author>
<author initials="P." surname="Rogaway">
<organization>UC Davis</organization>
</author>
<date month='May' year='2014'/>
</front>
<seriesInfo name="RFC" value="7253"/>
</reference>
++++
<t>Some datagram padding may be needed <xref target="RFC7253"/></t>
</middle><back>
<references anchor="_references">
<name>Normative References</name>
<reference anchor='RFC7253'
target='https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7253'>
<front>
<title>Guidelines for Writing an IANA Considerations
Section in RFCs</title> <author initials="T." surname="Krovetz">
<organization>Sacramento State</organization>
</author>
<author initials="P." surname="Rogaway">
<organization>UC Davis</organization>
</author>
<date month='May' year='2014'/>
</front>
<seriesInfo name="RFC" value="7253"/>
</reference>
</references>
The alternative method is to use a preprocessing tool, asciidoc-bibliography, to import citations into the Asciidoctor document from an external file of references.
The references file consists of RFC XML reference entries, and still needs to be managed manually; however the bibliographies are assembled from that file, sorted, and inserted into the normative and informative references in preprocessing. Citations in the document itself are given as macros to be interpreted by the preprocessor; this allows them to be split into normative and informative references. (The MMark tool likewise splits reference citations into normative and informative.)
Integration with the asciidoc-bibliography gem proceeds as follows:
[bibliography] == Normative References ++++ bibliography::norm[] ++++ [bibliography] == Informative References ++++ bibliography::info[] ++++
The following features of RFC XML are not supported by the Asciidoctor converter, and would need to be adjusted manually:
| RFC XML element | RFC XML v3 | RFC XML v2 |
|---|---|---|
| front/boilerplate | Not added by the converter | N/A |
| iref@primary | N | N |
| reference (and all children) | As Raw XML | As Raw XML |
| table/preamble | Deprecated | N |
| table/postamble | Deprecated | N |
| artwork@width | Only on images | Only on images |
| artwork@height | Only on images | Only on images |
To author an Asciidoctor RFC document, you should familiarise yourself with the Asciidoctor specification. The converter Ruby gem source code distribution also has samples of individual RFC XML features, in v2 and v3, and examples of self-standing Asciidoctor RFC XML documents, along with their RFC XML renderings. (This includes round-tripped RFC XML documents.)
In addition, you can clone the sample rfc-in-asciidoc-template repository as a template, and populate it for your AsciiDoc RFCs and Internet-Drafts:
$ git clone https://github.com/riboseinc/rfc-in-asciidoc-template
Converting your AsciiDoc to RFC XML is a simple as installing asciidoctor (see <http://asciidoctor.org/#installation>) and the asciidoctor-rfc gem in Ruby, then running the asciidoctor executable on the document, specifying the asciidoctor-rfc gem as a library:
$ git clone https://github.com/riboseinc/asciidoctor-rfc.git $ cd asciidoctor-rfc $ bundle install $ gem build asciidoctor-rfc.gemspec $ gem install asciidoctor-rfc $ asciidoctor -b rfc3 -r 'asciidoctor-rfc' a.adoc # RFC XML v3 output $ asciidoctor -b rfc2 -r 'asciidoctor-rfc' a.adoc # RFC XML v2 output
As you author Asciidoctor content, you should iterate through running the Asciidoctor conversion frequently, to ensure that you are still generating valid XML through your markup. The converter makes an effort to ensure that its XML output is valid, and it issues warnings about likely issues; it also validates its own XML output against the Asciidoctor schema, and reports errors in the XML output in the following format:
V3 RELAXNG Validation: 12:0: ERROR: Invalid attribute sortRefs for element rfc
Note that validation against the RELAXNG RFC XML schema includes confirming the referential integrity of all cross-references in the document.
It may be necessary to intervene in the XML output generated by the converter, either because the block model of Asciidoctor does not conform with the intended RFC XML (e.g. lists embedded in paragraphs), or because RFC XML features are required that are not supported within Asciidoctor.
This document does not require any action by IANA.
TODO.
| [RFC2119] | Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, DOI 10.17487/RFC2119, March 1997. |
| [RFC7749] | Reschke, J., "The "xml2rfc" Version 2 Vocabulary", RFC 7749, DOI 10.17487/RFC7749, February 2016. |
| [RFC7991] | Hoffman, P., "The "xml2rfc" Version 3 Vocabulary", RFC 7991, DOI 10.17487/RFC7991, December 2016. |
| [RFC5385] | Touch, J., "Version 2.0 Microsoft Word Template for Creating Internet Drafts and RFCs", RFC 5385, DOI 10.17487/RFC5385, February 2010. |
| [RFC7328] | Gieben, R., "Writing I-Ds and RFCs Using Pandoc and a Bit of XML", RFC 7328, DOI 10.17487/RFC7328, August 2014. |
| [RFC7763] | Leonard, S., "The text/markdown Media Type", RFC 7763, DOI 10.17487/RFC7763, March 2016. |
| [RFC7764] | Leonard, S., "Guidance on Markdown: Design Philosophies, Stability Strategies, and Select Registrations", RFC 7764, DOI 10.17487/RFC7764, March 2016. |
| [RFC7990] | Flanagan, H., "RFC Format Framework", RFC 7990, DOI 10.17487/RFC7990, December 2016. |
The authors would like to thank the following persons for their valuable advice and input.