Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

On Jul 2, 2009, at 9:22 AM, Marshall Eubanks wrote:

> On Jul 2, 2009, at 12:16 PM, Ted Hardie wrote:
>
> > At 10:19 PM -0700 7/1/09, Douglas Otis wrote:
> > > for wanting more than just plain text documents is to permit  
> > > inclusion of charts, graphs, and tables, for a visual society
> > It seems to me that where this discussion has faltered before is on  
> > whether this is, in fact, a requirement.
> You are exactly correct, and I can recall several interminable  
> discussions of this.
> To save time, I would suggest adopting the Patent Office rules on  
> Perpetual Motion. People advocating for a change to facilitate  
> figures (or to allow complicated math, such as tensor analysis)  
> should have an existence proof, i.e., a document that requires the  
> change to be published. (A document that left the IETF to be  
> published elsewhere for this reason would also do.)
What appears to be missed in these conversations represents a  
dissatisfaction of the generation tools and output quality, which is  
easily shared.  There is good reason to avoid closed source generation  
tools, however the IETF has already employed and permitted the use of  
roff inputs and outputs, which appears to offer a reasonable means to  
satisfy the many requirements already in place.
A suggestion to use Word XML outputs as a means of providing WISIWYG  
operation misses what is currently in place within xml2rfc needed to  
generate tables, state diagrams, and graphs.  Yes, these elements are  
_currently_ contained within existing RFCs,  but  in ASCII form.  Even  
though these elements are structured using ASCII, textual processing  
must still accommodate special handling of these clumsy visual elements.
Although I am not blind, the simple instructions required by roff  
tools should allow those visually impaired a superior means for  
understanding the intent of visual graphics, rather than guessing what  
a series of white-space and characters are attempting to convey within  
diagrams or equations.
In addition, there are currently several RFCs already created using  
roff, as were my first attempts at writing I-Ds.  Due to IETF's  
current level of support for xml2rfc, this mode of input now offers an  
easier means to generate acceptable output.  IMHO, roff tools can  
still offer higher quality output that is more compatible with various  
presentation media than outputs generated from xml2rfc.
Perhaps the IETF may wish to better retain the older roff methods by  
offering better boilerplate and processing support for this currently  
acceptable method for generating I-Ds and RFCs.  A wiki style web-page  
with IETF custom roff pre-preprocessors could facilitate roff inputs  
for the creation of ID and RFC documents.  The availability of roff to  
html output should also make creating previews as a type of iterative  
WISIWYG mode of creation possible.  This would be no different than  
the steps used with xml2rfc.
IIRC, .ps generated from roff tools are still acceptable inputs as  
well, although I expect the current publishing automation is likely to  
balk at output from these older methods.  Too bad though.
-Doug


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