Styling section listing contributors

[reschke]

see also #1 and #19

Authors frequently want to include an appendix listing contributors in addition to authors.

While this is possible as just prose, it's not possible to style this in a way similar to the "Authors" section. It's debatable whether this is actually desirable, but we see cases where authors just use the <artwork> element to get what they want.

That said, https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-flanagan-7322bis-03#section-4.11 says:

The Contributors section may include brief statements about the
nature of particular contributions (e.g., "Sam contributed
Section 3"), and it may also include affiliations of listed
contributors. At the discretion of the author(s), contact addresses
may also be included in the Contributors section, for those
contributors whose knowledge makes them useful future contacts for
information about the RFC. The format of any contact information
should be similar to the format of information in the Author's
Address section.

(emphasis mine)

This is currently impossible because we don't allow authors to control line breaks in prose.

A <br> element would fix this (but see #37).

An alternative way is implemented in rfc2629.xslt: https://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/rfc2629xslt/rfc2629xslt.html#ext.element.contributor

[martinthomson]

#19 seems to be a better result.

[reschke]

Well, that one was closed. It also has the problem that it suggests an incompatible change, in that existing code that checks for <author> tags would be misled.

[reschke]

Note that the possibility of a "Contributors" section already was documented in https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7322#section-4.11>, dated September 2014. We really should find a way to produce that with the v3 vocabulary.

[martinthomson]

By which you refer to "The format of any contact information should be similar to the format of information in the Author's Address section." I agree.