Subject: [Tools-discuss] Interest in title-less sub-sub-sections?

From: Nico Williams <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 12 Apr 2021 18:29:02 -0500

Consider the x.680 and x.690 series documents.  They typically have many
tiny sub-sub-sections, with many sub-sub-sections having just one or two
paragraphs and no title.

Presumably those tiny sub-sub-sections lack a title because a title
would make the documents less readable.  For tiny sub-sub-sections, the
lack of a title almost makes the sub-sub-section number akin to a
paragraph number.

E.g., x.690, where sections 8, 8.1, 8.1.1, ..., 8.19 have titles, but
8.1.1.1, ..., 8.19.1, 8.19.2, ..., do not:

   8 Basic encoding rules

   8.1 General rules for encoding

   8.1.1 Structure of an encoding

   8.1.1.1 The encoding of a data value shall consist of four components
   which shall appear in the following order:

   ...

   8.19 Encoding of an object identifier value

   8.19.1 The encoding of an object identifier value shall be primitive.

   8.19.2 The contents octets shall be an (ordered) list of encodings of
   subidentifiers (see 8.19.3 and 8.19.4) concatenated together.

   Each subidentifier is represented as a series of (one or more)
   octets. ...

   8.19.3 The number of subidentifiers ...

What's really nice about this is how easy it makes it to make very
specific references.  Also, because most sub-sub-sections are so short,
it is easy to refer to most every normative requirement/recommendation/
option.

Would we need any changes to the xml2rfc schema or tooling to make this
style possible for Internet-Drafts and RFCs?

Thanks,

Nico
--

---

From: [email-masked] (Dale R. Worley)
Date: Mon, 12 Apr 2021 21:35:47 -0400

> style possible for Internet-Drafts and RFCs?

Naively, I'd expect our tools to handle this smoothly if you declared a
section whose title is the null string.  But I haven't tried it.

Dale

---

From: Julian Reschke <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 13 Apr 2021 08:50:00 +0200

> it is easy to refer to most every normative requirement/recommendation/

As I just sid in the other thread: we already number paragraphs; we just
do not display these numbers.

In the example above, "8.1.1.1" would get an anchor like
"section-8.1.1-1". That's totally fine for references, the anchor is
easily discoverable from the HTML format.

> style possible for Internet-Drafts and RFCs?

It would need to start with a change in the Style Guide. I would prefer
to use what we already have (and maybe tune *that* instead).

Best regards, Julian