[rfc-i] RFC format: any discussions at the Paris IETF?
julian.reschke at gmx.de
Mon Feb 27 00:39:39 PST 2012
On 2012-02-27 04:29, Joe Touch wrote:
> On 2/26/2012 7:10 PM, John Levine wrote:
>>>> I think we all agree that whatever the canonical format is, we'll want
>>>> tools to translate from whatever editors people like, but it's worth
>>> FWIW, my point is that a form that doesn't have a WYSIWYG editor is,
>>> IMO, DOA.
>> We seem to have a severe confusion here between tools and document
> The two are not independent.
>> I think everyone agrees that authors of drafts can use whatever tools
>> they want to write and edit them,
>> and we should ensure that our choice
>> of future tools and formats lets that continue.
> That's where the complexity exists.
>> But that has
>> practically no bearing on what formats we eventually decide to use.
>> Let's imagine we like the xml2rfc profile of XML. There are screen
>> editors like xxe that can edit it directly.
> Edit source.
>> If people like MS Word,
>> it wouldn't be particularly hard to write tools to translate between
>> DOC or DOCX and xml2rfc,
> It took quite a while to get a Word tool that generated the appropriate
> TXT output. It is *incredibly* hard to write tools to some formats. If
> anyone thinks it's easy to generate "xml2rfc" XML in Word, please
> demonstrate that.
That is true, but it's not the fault of the xml2rfc format, but it's
caused by Word not capturing the information that would be needed.
That's why it's a poor choice as editing format; it focuses on
appearance instead of semantics.
Best regards, Julian
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