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Better Support for Human-Readable Information #3

Open djhaynes opened 4 years ago

djhaynes commented 4 years ago

Challenge: The community has noted challenges expressing prose guidance in XML/XHTML due to tools’ ability to process XHTML tags and the potential loss of formatting. Given this, there is interest in expressing content in other formats (e.g., Markdown).

Proposal: Investigate other formats (e.g., Markdown) for expressing prose guidance that better support the range of human-readable information (i.e., enable authors to paste directly from documentation rather than translating into XHTML).

wmunyan commented 4 years ago

I would add to this the possibility that the prose content should be completely separated from any machine-readable content, helping to reduce the size of automation content needing to be developed. A tool performing the assessment doesn't care about descriptions or rationales, etc. It cares about the check system, values, collection and evaluation.

If prose content is developed in its own document, a reference could be made in the XCCDF to that document, information related to each other via various IDs (Rule, Group, etc), and only the required automation content would be needed in the machine-readable documents.

This relates (somewhat) to #14, as well.

djhaynes commented 4 years ago

With respect to separating prose content from content required for automation, it would be nice to have the option, but, tools should be able to do it internally if they want since valid content is only required for interoperability.

djhaynes commented 4 years ago

During the XCCDF/OVAL breakout session at the March 2020 workshop, the group decided to backlog this issue and look to the content authoring/tooling group to improve the content authoring experience.