Subject: [xml2rfc] postcode city order

From: Eliot Lear <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 28 Feb 2012 21:26:03 +0100

Hi everyone,

Outside of the United States it is often (though certainly not
universally) true that postcodes are expected to come before cities. 
For instance, my work address would be as follows:

Richtistrasse 7
CH-8620 Wallisellen
Switzerland

It would be nice if there were a simple way to indicate postcode order. 
Perhaps as a parameter to address, such as the following:

<address postcode="beforecity">

With of course the appropriate default being "afterregion".

What do others think?

Eliot

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From: Julian Reschke <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 28 Feb 2012 21:57:06 +0100

> With of course the appropriate default being "afterregion".

I believe you're opening a can of worms :-)

Another approach would be to allow the author to specify the text as 
presented, and use the XML elements just for marking up.

Best regards, Julian

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From: Aaron Stone <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 28 Feb 2012 13:30:32 -0800

Upside: allows each address to self-describe its format.

Downside: each address must self-describe its format, and creates
spaghetti code with a variety of options, e.g. postcode-before-city,
number-before-street, position of state/region, if any, etc.

<address country_format="switzerland">

Upside: the tool provides the formatting from semantic tags.

Downside: the tool needs a big mapping of countries to customary formats.

Aaron

On Tue, Feb 28, 2012 at 12:26 PM, Eliot Lear <[email-masked]> wrote:
> _______________________________________________
> xml2rfc mailing list
> [email-masked]
> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/xml2rfc

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From: Tom Taylor <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 28 Feb 2012 16:51:21 -0500

I had the impression that I could effect the proper ordering simply by 
placing the postcode element ahead of the city element. There's a 
comment in Elwyn Davies's template that led me to that belief. The DTD 
doesn't precribe the order.

On 28/02/2012 4:30 PM, Aaron Stone wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 28, 2012 at 12:26 PM, Eliot Lear<[email-masked]>  wrote:
>> Hi everyone,
>>

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From: "Martin J. Dürst" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 29 Feb 2012 11:03:46 +0900

> For instance, my work address would be as follows:

Interesting. Didn't know you are in Switzerland, and pretty close to 
where I grew up.

> With of course the appropriate default being "afterregion".

I'd probably just throw "CH-8620 Wallisellen" into the <city> field and 
leave the code field blank. Of course, in the long term, it should be 
fixed. The best idea I think would be to take the input order and use it 
for output order.

Regards,   Martin.

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From: Aaron Stone <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 28 Feb 2012 18:08:16 -0800

On Tue, Feb 28, 2012 at 6:03 PM, "Martin J. Dürst"
<[email-masked]> wrote:
> Interesting. Didn't know you are in Switzerland, and pretty close to where I
> grew up.
>
>
> leave the code field blank. Of course, in the long term, it should be fixed.
> The best idea I think would be to take the input order and use it for output
> order.

Oh, that's clever. I forgot that XML can preserve order like that!
That seems like a great way to handle it, and probably not that
confusing for someone whose data is suddenly out of customary order,
once they notice it's simply in source XML order.

Aaron

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From: "Martin J. Dürst" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 29 Feb 2012 11:51:55 +0900

>> I'd probably just throw "CH-8620 Wallisellen" into the<city>  field and

Don't forget that XML was designed as a document format. It would be a 
bad thing if thesections, and paragraphs in a book would just appear in 
random order.

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From: Eliot Lear <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 29 Feb 2012 07:01:51 +0100

On 2/29/12 3:03 AM, "Martin J. Dürst" wrote:
>
> I'd probably just throw "CH-8620 Wallisellen" into the <city> field
> and leave the code field blank. Of course, in the long term, it should
> be fixed. The best idea I think would be to take the input order and
> use it for output order.
>

I like your idea!

Eliot

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From: Julian Reschke <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 29 Feb 2012 08:25:03 +0100

On 2012-02-29 03:03, "Martin J. Dürst" wrote:
> ...

Please. No.

> fixed. The best idea I think would be to take the input order and use it

Yes.

The main issue I see is that the rewrite of xml2rfc has made the 
maintenance problem worse. It's unclear to me what the state is 
(finished? what about the open bugs? why isn't the RFC production center 
not using it?), and who's supposed to make future changes to the DTD.

Best regards, Julian

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From: "Martin J. Dürst" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 29 Feb 2012 19:31:15 +0900

>> leave the code field blank. Of course, in the long term, it should be

Sorry, I was proposing this only as a bandaid, assuming that Eliot is 
working on getting out a draft this week or next.

Regards,   Martin.