Subject: RE: Alternative formats for IDs

From: "Yaakov Stein" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 3 Jan 2006 06:47:59 +0200

That sensitivity to costs of participation is not as important
to most of the SDOs on my list and, I would assume, on yours.
Instead, their norm is participation or membership fees that, in
many cases, I consider high enough to be barriers, requirements
for meeting attendance.  If the minimum entry cost for
participation in SDO X --including membership fees and minimal
meeting attendance costs-- is $5K or $10K or more, then maybe
maintaining even a dedicated machine for dealing with their
documents is a reasonable marginal cost.   But, for IETF
participation, it is not.

[YJS] This is the first cogent reason I have seen so far on this list
against Word. Of course,  out suggesting did not mandate Word,
and specifically allows anyone not having a copy to continue using
ASCII or XML, and since PDF would be available as output (and 
has a free viewer) all RFCs would be available for all to read.
 
The downside is that when a group is working on a document
in Word, anyone not having the SW would not be able to directly 
contribute - but joint work is not really practical using any system
without tracking anyway.
 
Y(J)S

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From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 03 Jan 2006 14:59:34 -0500

--On Tuesday, 03 January, 2006 06:47 +0200 Yaakov Stein
<[email-masked]> wrote:

> in Word, anyone not having the SW would not be able to
> directly  contribute - but joint work is not really practical
> using any system without tracking anyway.

That is an interesting observation.  It must be true since you
say it is.   

However, I wonder what it means that I have my name, as author
or editor, on, by rough count, 27 RFCs.  And I've been a major
contributor (of text, not just ideas, for a few more).  Of
those,  all but about three were collaborative, with multiple
people contributing text.   And, of that group, the number that
started in Word, including one of those non-listed-editor
collaborations, was two.

I guess the other 25+ documents must not have been practical to
produce.

At one level, I'm sympathetic to what you are saying and trying
to accomplish.  While there are many characteristics of Word
that I dislike, I like its tracking facilities and ability to
turn tracking displays and marginal comments on and off.  Used
properly, I find them much more satisfactory than anything I've
been able to do with CVS-like and Diff-like systems: the latter
are better at identifying what has been changed (although that
can be effectively simulated in Word by letting it generate
change tracking by comparing two documents) but far worse at
recording and identifying the reasons why the changes were made.
Unfortunately, even if one ignores most of the issues with
proprietary format and costs, it is hopeless for IETF use in
managing working documents and RFCs.  Among the problems:

	(1) Its template mechanism is very version-sensitive and
	fairly fragile.  If one makes template or option changes
	to accommodate IETF needs, one cannot then go back and
	forth with the formatting requirements of "day job"
	documents without risking making a royal, and
	essentially irreversible, mess.
	
	(2) Its Style model is even more version-sensitive and
	even more fragile.  It is also badly documented and
	idiosyncratic.  But it, or major template changes, or
	both, are necessary if one is going to produce IETF
	documents that correspond to RFC Editor norms (and I'm
	not just talking about ASCII output).
	
	(3) Its cross-reference model is so "smart" in terms of
	what can be referenced, what header styles it can be
	used with, etc., that cross-references in RFC Style and
	within RFC objects are not consistently possible.  The
	facilities of WordPerfect 4.2 in this area, nearly two
	decades ago, were far superior, I believe because of
	less of an attitude of "we know what you need and, if we
	don't supply it, you don't need it".
	
	(4) Others have pointed out the versioning problem in
	terms of reading documents, but it is worse than that.
	I've seen document formatting and structure destroyed
	beyond recognition or recovery by the simple mechanism
	of being moved back and forth among authors who are
	using different version of Word, even when Word 2000 is
	the oldest of them.   I know how to mitigate that
	problem but it would require far more drastic changes in
	how the IETF does business than merely switching working
	document formats.
	
	(5) Other than change-tracking, Word has very little
	built-in collaboration machinery.  I have the impression
	that there are even fewer such facilities in recent
	versions than in earlier ones.  Instead, the strong
	collaboration facilities require even more expensive
	versions of Office, use of Outlook for email, and other
	client and server conventions that would be far more
	problematic for the IETF.
	
	(6) While I had high hopes for the XML output from Word
	(again, available only with Office Professional and
	above, if there is an "above), the 2003 version turns
	out to be one of the stranger things I have every seen.
	The XML output from Office 12 is supposed to be much
	better -- I haven't seen it-- but it is, again,
	incompatible.

That is by no means my entire list, but it is indicative.  And
others may have other lists or entries.

For all of those reasons and others -- and I am still concerned
about costs and share the concerns of others about proprietary
and changing formats -- actually IETF use of Word seems to be to
be a non-starter.

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.
	
	(2) Development of a converter between the MS-XML output
	of Word Pro 2003 and the XML input of RFC 2629bis so
	that xml2rfc and its friends could take responsibility
	for final formatting.  Note that, if the converter were
	two-way, you could edit happily in Word and others could
	edit happily in XML and both could interwork.  However,
	as with the above, I think this solution would rapidly
	deteriorate into uselessness unless there were a
	commitment to produce new versions as new versions of
	Office appeared -- at least until Microsoft stabilizes
	and documents their XML formats.

To the extent to which the trend toward a requirement --not just
an option-- for XML input to the RFC Editor process --
continues, the first of these options might easily become
unavailable.

    john

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From: "Theodore Ts'o" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 4 Jan 2006 12:03:29 -0500

> 	and documents their XML formats.

And even when Microsoft stablizes their XML formats, each person who
wants to use the converter will have to apply individually to
Microsoft for a patent license, for which Microsoft has apparently
reserved the right to deny in the future for any reason.  Sweet....

						- Ted