Subject: RE: XML2RFC submission (was Re: ASCII art)

From: Paul Hoffman <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 25 Nov 2005 10:45:46 -0800

At 9:13 PM -0800 11/24/05, Christian Huitema wrote:
>An interesting part of the current text format is that it is defined in
>a very simple way: so many lines, so many columns, that's about it.

Just to clarify: there are no number of lines or number of columns 
requirements for submitting Internet Drafts. It is acceptable to turn 
in unpaginated plain text, and the number of columns is only required 
for ASCII art if you want your Internet Draft to be eventually 
published as an RFC.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--VPN Consortium

_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf

---

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 26 Nov 2005 03:58:58 -0500

--On Friday, November 25, 2005 10:45 AM -0800 Paul Hoffman 
<[email-masked]> wrote:

>> An interesting part of the current text format is that it is
>> defined in a very simple way: so many lines, so many columns,
>> that's about it.
>
> Just to clarify: there are no number of lines or number of
> columns requirements for submitting Internet Drafts. It is
> acceptable to turn in unpaginated plain text, and the number
> of columns is only required for ASCII art if you want your
> Internet Draft to be eventually published as an RFC.

Unfortunately, this is no longer true, or wasn't true a year or 
so ago.   Someone (there was no public announcement) decided 
that I-D announcements needed to contain a page count.  The 
secretariat responded by (quite properly) complaining to 
individual authors that unpaginated documents made their work 
much harder and that long lines broke their tools.  And, as 
others have pointed out, we are now operating in a world in 
which, if one doesn't have the boilerplate, and _exactly_ the 
right boilerplate, the submissions get bounced.

How this happened, after what consideration of tradeoffs, and on 
what authority from the community is another thread, but it 
certainly has happened.

     john

---

From: Paul Hoffman <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 26 Nov 2005 08:34:57 -0800

At 3:58 AM -0500 11/26/05, John C Klensin wrote:
>Unfortunately, this is no longer true, or wasn't true a year or so 
>ago.   Someone (there was no public announcement) decided that I-D 
>announcements needed to contain a page count.  The secretariat 
>responded by (quite properly) complaining to individual authors that 
>unpaginated documents made their work much harder and that long 
>lines broke their tools.  And, as others have pointed out, we are 
>now operating in a world in which, if one doesn't have the 
>boilerplate, and _exactly_ the right boilerplate, the submissions 
>get bounced.
>

Wow. I didn't know that because I switched over to XML around that 
time; before then, I was using plain text without pagination.

If it is still true, it is also sad. Forcing people to use 
non-intuitive formatting tools just so someone can have a page count 
for Internet Drafts is not conducive to getting good work from 
volunteer Internet Draft authors.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--VPN Consortium

---

From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 27 Nov 2005 11:40:56 +0100

--On 26. november 2005 03:58 -0500 John C Klensin <[email-masked]> wrote:

> Unfortunately, this is no longer true, or wasn't true a year or so ago.
> Someone (there was no public announcement) decided that I-D announcements
> needed to contain a page count.  The secretariat responded by (quite
> properly) complaining to individual authors that unpaginated documents
> made their work much harder and that long lines broke their tools.  And,
> as others have pointed out, we are now operating in a world in which, if
> one doesn't have the boilerplate, and _exactly_ the right boilerplate,
> the submissions get bounced.

The last requirement (boilerplate) was done on legal advice, and after 
discussions in the IPR WG that are much too voluminous for me to even 
remember.... it may be an unwise decision, but it was a very public one.

Note about the requirement for pagecounts:
A recent announcement without a pagecount was 
draft-goldman-ieprep-comparision-00, which came out on Oct 21; on 
inspection, that draft has an odd method of pagination (formfeed character 
immediately followed by the header of the page), suggesting that the tool 
had failed to count pages correctly, but the I-D was still posted.

So it doesn't seem to be a policed requirement....

                        Harald

---

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 27 Nov 2005 12:08:44 +0100

Harald Tveit Alvestrand wrote:
...
> remember.... it may be an unwise decision, but it was a very public one.

Judging by the occasional arrival of legal letters related to
copyright issues, I think it was a very wise decision. The last thing
we need is ambiguity in this area.

    Brian