Re: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standard

On Jul 3, 2009, at 3:16 PM, Doug Ewell wrote:

> Douglas Otis <dotis at mail dash abuse dot org> wrote:
>
> > Reliance upon open source tools ensures the original RFCs and ID  
> > can be maintained by others, without confronting unresolvable  
> > compatibility issues.
> Whether a tool is open source or not has nothing to do with how many  
> people know how to use it.  Are you talking about maintainability of  
> the documents or of the tools?
The concern is about the application accepting document instructions  
and text and then generating document output.  When this application  
is proprietary, it is prone to change where remedies might become  
expensive or impossible.  The evolution in hardware tends to force the  
use of different operating systems which may no longer support older  
applications.
IIRC, I did work back in the early 90's that contained Russian written  
using Word 5.  Conversion proved difficult since proprietary fonts  
were needed.  Document recovery then required a fair amount of work to  
rediscover the structure and character mapping.  Trying to get any  
version of Word to generate plain text outputs consistently always  
seemed to be a PITA, that varied from version to version, and never  
seemed worth the effort.
> > It would also be a bad practice to rely upon unstable proprietary  
> > formats having limited OS support and significant security issues.
> Oh, stop.  Word 2007 can read and save Word 97 documents.
Instead of 10 years, go back another 5 years.  When people are  
required to input Word Document "instructions" into their Word  
application, they might become exposed to system security issues as  
well.  The variability of the Word data structures makes identifying  
security threats fairly difficult, where many "missing" features seem  
to be an intended imposition as a means to necessitate use of the  
vendor's macro language.  Inherent security issues alone should  
disqualify use of proprietary applications.
>  Applications for Windows, which has a 90% to 93% desktop market  
> share, can hardly be said to suffer from "limited OS support."
When support is almost exclusively Windows, this still represents  
limited support.   It would be sending the wrong message to mandate  
the use of proprietary operating systems or applications in order to  
participate in IETF efforts.  After all, lax security often found  
within proprietary operating systems and applications threatens the  
Internet.
> And turning off macros is becoming more and more common among Word  
> users; it's even a separate non-default document format under Word  
> 2007.
The many automation features fulfilled by TCL and xml2rfc will likely  
be attempted with the native word processor scripts.   The latest  
Word, if you can afford it, is almost ISO/IEC 29500:2008 Office Open  
XML compliant.  Perhaps Word will be compliant in its 2010 version. :^(
> I know The Penguin doesn't like the fact that Word is closed-source,  
> but -- like the multiple discussions being lumped under "RFC  
> archival format" -- we need to separate that issue from questions of  
> whether the app is any good.  And if we're talking about an author  
> using Word (or TextPad or roff or whatever) to pre-process a file  
> into an RFC Editor-friendly format, which can then be converted to  
> traditional RFC text or HTML or PDF or something, then isn't the  
> horror of using Word limited to that author?
Open source includes more than just Linux, and the exposure of  
requiring proprietary applications or operating systems would affect  
nearly all IETF participants that maintain existing documents or  
generating new ones.
-Doug



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