[rpd] modernizing AFRINIC policy authoring tooling with markdown ?

[Benson Muite]

Loganaden Velvindron <loganaden at gmail.com> writes:

Hi Loganaden,

> Hi All,
>
> I noticed the following when browsing the AFRINIC website:
> https://afrinic.net/policy.html#propose
> "Propose a Policy
>
> Please use the policy proposal template below to format and present
> your proposal.
> Send the policy proposal to pdwg at afrinic.net copied to
> policy-submission at afrinic.net. According to the provisions of the PDP,
> a proposal can also be posted directly to rpd at afrinic.net (the policy
> discussion mailing list). We, however, recommend that it is shared
> with the PDWG co-chairs first in case any structural changes to the
> content and formatting are needed."
>
> I was wondering why wouldn't AFRINIC look into improving the tooling
> for policy submission by automating & validating with a format like
> markdown, and offering a template in markdown format and a markdown
> validator to avoid the manual process of fixing the formatting ?

Markdown is not standardized and there are many different flavors, so it
is challenging to have a consistenst set of processing tools across
projects.

Would suggest using another plain text format. As an example AsciiDoc:
https://asciidoc.org/
has a standardization process - tooling is adequate but could be
improved. ReStructured Text:
https://docutils.sourceforge.io/rst.html
does not have a standardization process, but there is good tooling
though primarily for Python.

One could consider other markup formats that translate well to XML and
do not need multiple random extensions - XML has tools that allow for
programmable conversion between multiple output document formats such as
html and pdf which is very helpful for publishing toolchains.

Some African laws are processed using a custom markup language:
https://github.com/laws-africa/bluebell
to produce XML output.  A simple plaintext custom markup language is
another option.


>
> The IETF has this which could help to reduce workload:
> https://authors.ietf.org/drafting-in-markdown
>
> Kind regards,
> Loganaden Velvindron
>

Regards,
Benson