Subject: [Xml-sg-cmt] Fwd: [Tools-discuss] Why do we even have text formats any more?

From: Robert Sparks <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 1 Aug 2021 13:05:41 -0500

Forwarding this observation to this list to help with finding it later.

-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: 	Re: [Tools-discuss] Why do we even have text formats any more?
Date: 	Sun, 1 Aug 2021 17:55:18 +0200
From: 	Carsten Bormann <[email-masked]>
To: 	Julian Reschke <[email-masked]>
CC: 	Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>, [email-masked]

On 2021-07-31, at 06:31, Julian Reschke <[email-masked]> wrote:
> "extra stuff" such as?

Wrong question.

Currently, we generate a TXT format from the XML, which (possibly among 
other renditions) is checked by the authors during AUTH48. This format 
is there guaranteed to have the information that should survive a 
copy/paste into another text document (e.g., the comments in a program).

The HTML plus the not further defined, platform specific conversion from 
HTML to TXT does not give us these assurances. So removing the TXT 
format removes reliable copy/paste into other plaintext documents.

2⁶⁴ becomes 264. “ “ becomes . Etc.

(Note that there are occasionally discussions to remove information from 
the TXT format to make it look more like the HTML, in particular because 
it would sometimes require information from the authors to always do 
this information generation properly for the TXT form. These discussions 
need to be informed by the need to copy/paste RFC snippets into 
plaintext documents.)

Grüße, Carsten

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