Subject: RE: Alternative formats for IDs

From: "Yaakov Stein" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 3 Jan 2006 07:04:23 +0200

> Word is of course out of the question since it is proprietary,
> undocumented, and unstable.  I hope we have consensus on that.

Sorry, no such consensus.
 
I don't see why the editor you use needs to be open-standard.
As far as I know the IETF is attempting to standardize IP-related
communications protocols, not editors.
 
I do hope that the monitor and keyboard you are using
while reading and sending emails have their schematic diagrams
in the public domain. And please do not write any IETF documents
while using a mouse from a certain proprietary company who holds
dozens of patents on mouse technology.
 
More seriously, Word is the only commonly used editor
with an integrated tracking mechanism. I assume that even
the purists who insist on nroff occasionally write an ID
with others. I personally prefer to use TeX as a typesetting
format when writing on my own, but use word for IDs 
since I have to cooperate with co-authors.
 
Y(J)S

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From: grenville armitage <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 03 Jan 2006 16:17:11 +1100

> I don't see why the editor you use needs to be open-standard.

The document format needs to be documented. (I think in the context of
this thread it is clear that "Word is... since it proprietary" was a
comment about Word's file format rather than the editor itself.)

	[..]
> in the public domain.

I believe most keyboards and monitors use interfaces whose definitions
are documented, available and implemented by multiple manufacturers.

cheers,
gja

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From: Doug Royer <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 02 Jan 2006 22:22:39 -0700

Yaakov Stein wrote:

> I... And please do not write any IETF documents

I would complain about that also, if I had to buy that mouse
in order to read a free ID.

> since I have to cooperate with co-authors.

Try CVS or SVN and diff - works for everyone.

-- 

Doug Royer                     | http://INET-Consulting.com
-------------------------------|-----------------------------

               We Do Standards - You Need Standards

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From: "Randy.Dunlap" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 2 Jan 2006 21:57:19 -0800

> Sorry, no such consensus.

Well, you certainly don't have agreement/concensus that MS Word
should be used either.

> dozens of patents on mouse technology.

No need to be silly.

and from a different email from Y(J)S:
> Which is exactly the reason all the other SDOs
> use MS Word for input and PDF for output.

*all* others do?  That's hard to accept.

---
~Randy

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From: "John R Levine" <[email-masked]>
Date: 3 Jan 2006 01:50:03 -0500

> Sorry, no such consensus.

No problem.  We've taken your tip and redefined consensus to exclude
anyone who disagrees with us.

> I don't see why the editor you use needs to be open-standard.

Actually, I don't care what editor you use and I doubt that anyone else
does, either.  I do care quite a lot what document formats you expect me
to deal with, and for reasons that other people have already explained,
undocumented, unstable, proprietary formats are non-starters for archival
documents such as RFCs.

> More seriously, Word is the only commonly used editor with an integrated
> tracking mechanism. I assume that even the purists who insist on nroff
> occasionally write an ID with others.

Indeed we do, and we appreciate the fact that Emacs integrates so well
with RCS and CVS.

What I see here is severe confusion between tools and formats, and a lack
of clarity about input and output formats.  I happen to write entire books
with other authors and editors, and although I am often stuck using Word
as an input format because that is the only editor they know, I cannot
begin to tell you how badly Word stinks for the purpose, particularly if I
need to do something with a document other than print it out.  I have
written whole books in subset troff and then mechanically translated it to
other formats such as RTF for the Word crowd, because the tools I can use
on ASCII files with explicit markup are so much better than the feeble set
that work on Word files.

Of the various additional formats people have proposed, the only one that
makes sense for I-D's is RFC2629 XML.  It's well specified, and it's ASCII
underneath so we can be confident it'll be readable in the future even if
our tools get lost.  If you want to use Word to edit it, fine, go hire
someone to write a Word converter for it.  (Best not to say "oh, that
would cost too much" unless you want to hear a whole lot of snickering.)

Since XML can be kind of hard to read, PDF/A is a reasonable alternate
presentation format, but I would be happier if every PDF/A I-D and RFC had
to come with an XML original so we can edit it reasonably.

Regards,
John Levine, [email-masked], Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://www.johnlevine.com, Mayor
"I shook hands with Senators Dole and Inouye," said Tom, disarmingly.

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From: Jari Arkko <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 03 Jan 2006 09:02:08 +0200

Yaakov,

> Sorry, no such consensus.

If you truly want to improve the IETF document format,
may I suggest that we drop the fighting on formats
that are known to be controversial, and concentrate on
finding solutions that have some likelihood of being
acceptable. For instance, we've got people backing
proposals involving PDF/A and HTML, possibly in
combination with XML. If we had a new proposal on
the table with the details it would be more constructive
to continue this discussion.

--Jari