Subject: RE: Henning's proposal (Re: ASCII art)

From: "Hallam-Baker, Phillip" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2005 09:18:59 -0800

Having spent a considerable amount of time working on the question of whether incorporation by reference results in a legaly binding and enforceable agreement the answer appears to be 'it depends'. If you look at VeriSign certificates you will find all manner of attempts to get the magical phrase 'incorporate by reference' in front of the reader.
 
Ultimately the pragmatic definition of the law is what a judge chooses to decide the law is. Judges can make crazy rulings and they don't all get reversed on appeal.
 
In this case I would not worry too much because the boilerplate itself is essentially an attempt to incorporate by reference a longer exposition. The argument that the XML2RFC directives are a machine readable version of the same would be straightforward.
 
I am much less concerned by the RFC boilerplate than other aspects of the way the IETF operates. For example the handling of 'note well' is far less rigorous than any other forum I participate in, particularly since there is no rigoruous handling of note well wrt mailing list subscriptions which is where we claim the work take place. I have serious concerns on the anti-trust front as well, conversations that should worry people are far too common. 

________________________________

From: [email-masked] on behalf of Harald Tveit Alvestrand
Sent: Wed 23/11/2005 11:07 AM
To: Henning Schulzrinne; Eliot Lear
Cc: Dave Aronson (re IETF); [email-masked]
Subject: Henning's proposal (Re: ASCII art)

--On onsdag, november 23, 2005 09:58:23 -0500 Henning Schulzrinne
<[email-masked]> wrote:

> Let me try a concrete proposal:
>
> - All document editors MUST submit XML format to the RFC editor. (Mostly)
> semantic markup makes a lot more sense than presentation mark-up as it
> makes it possible to translate the format into a variety of output
> formats. This format is the long-term archival format, as it seems highly
> unlikely that the world will suddenly forget how to interpret XML in any
> timeframe we care about. The schema/DTD is documented in ASCII, so if an
> alien invaders take over the (IETF) world, they can bootstrap, as long as
> they can figure out English.

this is possible to say. I don't know if it's acceptable.... for instance,
XML2RFC versions invoke boilerplate, they don't contain it; are there legal
dragons here, or is the naming of a publicly-identified DTD/schema enough
of an invocation of legalisms?

> - Authors can use Word (or other formats), but must use a Word style that
> makes automatic translation to the 2629 XML possible. I don't know enough
> about Word internals to know if Word styles are sufficient to make this
> possible today, but with a bit of semantic mark-up (e.g., surround the
> abstract with tags), this shouldn't be too hard.

has anyone proved by demonstration that this is possible?
It doesn't have to be part of the rules...

> - The XML version is made available to the public and is the
> authoritative version, in addition to the traditional ASCII version. The
> XML version can then be used to generate more readable and printable
> versions using XSLT or other tools. I suspect generating a PDF version
> wouldn't be hard, either. These presentation formats can then evolve as
> people care to write tools.

You can't have two authoritative versions..........

> - The XML format also allows the use of UTF-8, for use in examples, not
> as normative text. The translation to ASCII can automatically insert U+
> or other appropriate elements.

How would the translation know when U+ is appropriate...?
>
> - SVG or a subset thereof is authorized for illustrative (non-normative)
> diagrams. The XML schema already supports the ability to link alternative
> renditions of graphics, so this requires minimal effort.

I suspect that there are dragons here too.... but I've never tried to do
anything with SVG, so I don't know the tools for it....

> I think this would actually put us ahead of standards organizations that
> use presentation-oriented document formats that are hard to transform
> into alternative renditions now or in the future. None of the above
> requires a major change in process, rules or procedures. The only 'tools'
> effort would be to create a suitable DOC template. Given that converting
> existing late-stage drafts may be onerous, this can be phased in over
> time.

Just nibbling at the details.... the big question is whether this will be
felt as help or hindrance to the people who do the real work...

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