Lets unpack this argument:
In the serious publishing world there are editors who review prose and
nit pick. Therefore all nit picking is evidence of serious publishing
and all criticism comes from 'unpublishable wankers'.
As a matter of record I am a published author, my editors at Addison
Wesley did have a somewhat weird review format but the final book is
professionally typeset by a designer who had a clue about typography.
On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 4:15 PM, james woodyatt<jhw(_at_)apple(_dot_)com> wrote:
On Jun 29, 2009, at 16:22, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
It is not the height of the barrier, it is the perception that people are
making nit-picking objections for the sake of rubbing people's noses in the
fact that they can decide where to put the bar.
In the more traditional publishing milieus of which I'm aware, that sort of
perception is the shibboleth that separates the serious writers from the
unpublishable wankers. Prospective authors who express a sense of
entitlement to the submission of their manuscripts in formats that don't
meet the requirements of the editors who review them are usually encouraged
to start their own publishing outfits and see if they can do it all better
by themselves.
Occasionally, this encouragement is even delivered without the use of coarse
language.
We participants are our own acquisitions editors here, of course, so the
height of the barrier is what we should be thinking about. It makes sense
to me that we should be automating the mechanical screening of manuscripts
coming into the slushpile so that they meet the machine-scriptable subset of
the requirements of the RFC Editor as closely as possible.
Are there any nitpicks the draft submission service enforces that aren't
really RFC Editor requirements? What are they? Let's fix those. What I
don't want to see is a lot of drafts start piling up without even coming
close to meeting the *mechanical* requirements of the RFC Editor, much less
the more difficult syntax requirements of the working natural language we've
chosen. It won't help anyone if we allow authors to defer the process of
cleaning up the formatting and boilerplate of a draft until late enough in
the review cycle that major reformatting deltas look to the differencing
tools like all-new content.
If this was about really about quality or readability I would be a lot
more sympathetic. But when a draft is rejected because xml2rfc produces a
txt file that is rejected because some nit-picker does not quite like the
exact TXT format then the whole process is bogus.
For my part, I haven't any serious complaints about the status quo (plenty
of unserious ones, but no serious ones). The process works well enough for
me-- modulo the limitations imposed by our choice of archival format, and my
general complaints about the open usability issues of XML2RFC on which I
mostly agree with EKR, and on which I'm no more prepared to do anything
about than either he or Iljitsch seems to be.
So long as we are not discussing any proposals to *change* the set of
approved archival formats, I'll continue to be happy-- nay, very impressed,
actually-- with how well XML2RFC meets our needs, despite the its obvious
warts.
If we decide to open another discussion about new archival formats, then
I'll be interested to follow along, but archival formats aren't on the table
here-- at least, I hope not.
-----
Shorter james: I'm far from convinced that changing the draft submission
server to be more lenient is the best way to address the deficiencies in the
software we're using, and I also think that opening a new discussion about
archival formats will mean unleashing a yet another force-ten maelstrom of
controversy that I'd prefer to observe from a very, very safe distance, i.e.
one measured in parsecs.
--
james woodyatt <jhw(_at_)apple(_dot_)com>
member of technical staff, communications engineering
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