Subject: RE: Alternative formats for IDs

From: "Gray, Eric" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 3 Jan 2006 15:13:29 -0500

--> Lets go ahead and ask then -
-->     Does anyone else think that IETF should allow documents which
-->     format/structure is not publicly known as one of the ways to
-->     distribute IETF specifications?

Clarifying that "publicly known" means "well defined and publicly 
available", I would answer no...

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From: "Lars-Erik Jonsson \(LU/EAB\)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 4 Jan 2006 18:19:34 +0100

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

I hope so too!

I initially thought the proposal to use M$ Word as an official
format was a joke. The IETF has a tradition of not caring how
our documents are prepared, that is up to the editor, while we
have a simple common format for our working and published
documents. I personally use Word for preparing my drafts, as
Word works well for me when kept in a single environment (and
"at one point" in time). However, based on experience from
trying to get standards documents from other SDOs, I consider
Word completely broken for publishing purposes. It produces
complex files, the format is unstable and not even compatible
with itself, etc. 

Personally, I do not agree ASCII is insufficient. But if others
do I would support taking small steps towards a new format, if
that format is as openly specified, stable, non-proprietary,
and can be expected to be generally readable over time and in
*all* environments.

/L-E

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From: "Lars-Erik Jonsson \(LU/EAB\)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 4 Jan 2006 18:42:57 +0100

> I do believe that, if you want to do initial document
> preparation in Word, you should be able to do that.  As others
> have suggested, no one I know of is really interested in
> standardizing on or requiring a particular editor.  But, to do
> so, you need to be able to produce an editable format that is no
> worse than ASCII.  You may have better ideas, but, as I have
> explored that range of options, I've come to the conclusion that
> there ought to be two ways to accomplish that end.  They are:
> 
> 	(1) Development of an "IETF printer driver" that can be
> 	distributed as freeware or with minimal costs and
> 	restrictions and that would produce lines and pages of
> 	the right layouts _and_ would handle "smart character"
> 	to ASCII conversions, generation of appropriate
> 	line-ending sequences, etc.  Whomever developed this
> 	thing would need to make a long-term commitment to
> 	producing and maintaining versions for every version of
> 	Windows from, I think, Win98 through the indefinite
> 	future.  The generic printer and the conventions of RFC
> 	3285 are demonstrably not good enough.

A completely correct observation:
Since the draft-stage of RFC 3285, I have been using MS-Word
as editing tool, and appreciated the WYSIWYG and tracking
advantages of it. However, since the output of the M$ generic
printer driver has changed for *EACH* version of Windows,
I have had to update the parser each time I wanted to support
a new Windows variant, I now have one parser for NT4, one for
98, one for 2000, one for XP, and I even had to improve the
XP version to work properly with Office 2003 under 2000. 

This could be done, and it only affected me who decided to
still use Word as my editing tool. I still believe Word may
be a proper choice for draft editors, but they should be
aware of the problems, and Word is for sure not a proper
format for publishing documents.

/L-E

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From: "Gray, Eric" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 4 Jan 2006 12:56:52 -0500

Yaakov,

	Yes, that would be most of what I meant by "publicly 
available."   Since we're trying to be very precise, I also
include the notion of "readily available documentation" in
the broader concept to "publicly available" where "readily"
may be implied in your use of "open" - and essentially means
that I can get a copy without signing another mortgage.

--
Eric

--> -----Original Message-----
--> From: Yaakov Stein [mailto:[email-masked]] 
--> Sent: Wednesday, January 04, 2006 1:15 AM
--> To: Gray, Eric
--> Cc: [email-masked]
--> Subject: RE: Alternative formats for IDs
--> 
-->  
--> 
--> > Clarifying that "publicly known" means "well defined and publicly
--> available", I would answer no...
--> 
--> and if it is restricted to mean 
-->   "open description so that you could write your own editor 
--> to read and
--> write this format" ?
--> 
-->

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From: "Yaakov Stein" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 5 Jan 2006 06:45:54 +0200

> If you do not know how to do that with Word, there is help to get.

Yes, in RFC 3285.

3285 Using Microsoft Word to create Internet Drafts and RFCs. M.
     Gahrns, T. Hain. May 2002. (Format: TXT=34556 bytes) (Status:
     INFORMATIONAL)

[YJS] Yes of course we all have used that.
 
However, unfortunately there are problems with that route
and no-one is supporting it (as XML2RFC is supported). 
 
For example, when printing directly from Word (rather
than first producing the ASCII and then printing)
the margins are all wrong.
 
Also, certain combinations of characters I use in ASCII art
cause (for some unknown and undocumented reason)
strange unprintable characters to appear in the ASCII version.
 
In the past I have reported problems to the authors of the RFC,
who responded but obviously did not have the time
to look into the specifics.
 
I also tried the TeX tools. I am a TeX fanatic and have 
written countless articles and two large books in TeX,
including my own styles and "low level" programming.
 
The LaTeX style is not very good and also apparently
unsupported. The several dvi2txt tools I tried all had bugs.
I was going to hack up something myself, but then was scared
off by my own experiences, realizing that if I started I would
have to support the thing for the rest of my mortal life.
 
So I returned to XML except for cooperative drafts.
And I suffer. But at  least when I contribute to  ITU, MFA,
MEF, ETSI, etc I don't have to shop around.
I simply use the editor already installed on my
computer.
 
Y(J)S

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From: Bob Braden <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 Jan 2006 11:51:41 -0800 (PST)

*> I would like to enable automated testing of ABNF. 

Note that the RFC Editor has been running ABNF through an
automated checker, for quite a long time.  We find errors.

RFC Editor/bb

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From: Bob Braden <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 12 Jan 2006 15:26:16 -0800 (PST)

Who is volunteering to maintain xml2rfc and guarantee backwards
compatibility for the next 20 years?  (And why should
we believe them?)

Bob Braden

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From: [email-masked] (Scott Bradner)
Date: Thu, 12 Jan 2006 22:26:06 -0500 (EST)

Dave sed:
> Nroff has no current industry penetration.

fwiw - Nroff is on every Mac OSX shipped

it is a shell procedure that fronts groff

Scott

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From: "Hallam-Baker, Phillip" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 13 Jan 2006 13:14:44 -0800

> From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]] On 
> Behalf Of Spencer Dawkins

> Agree with Barry that we need to balance things wisely.
> 
> If we are routinely taking up RFC-Editor resources for 
> cosmetic reformatting of XML2RFC output, I'm thinking that 
> this is not a good use of resources.

I heartily agree. 

I find it completely bizare that we have people saying that TXT is good
enough then say that the process has to allow for pretification.