Erik Naggum writes:
What _really_ amazes me about this, was that NOT ONE SINGLE READER
of the draft noticed that this had changed. We've spent something
like a week fighting over it, and NO ONE REMEMBERED it had changed,
including those responsible for the change. _Totally_ amazing!
Erik, you have missed the most simple explanation for this, which is what I
have been saying all along -- nobody cares very much about such a trivial
little point as whether or not comments nest. It is, as Nathaniel says, a red
herring. And given this explanation, there is absolutely nothing amazing about
what has happened. It is, in fact, just what I would expect to happen, and I am
pleased and encouraged to note that everyone else gave this issue all the
attention it deserved.
The time for such picking of nits is past. Let's put this sucker to bed. It is
only when we get a _lot_ more implementation experience that we'll know what
changes need to be made in RichText. I seriously doubt if the nature of
comments is going to be on that list in any case -- I expect to see some
semantic changes, but syntactic changes of this sort are just too trivial to
worry about.
Personally, given the nature of RichText I thought the notion that comments do
not nest was a little strange, but my position has been and continues to be
that such syntactic matters are not worthy of consideration. I was simply being
consistent with this position when I didn't bother to research the matter
further.
Let me at this point, partly because I feel a little embarrassed
at not knowing about this, partly because I'm pissed at the authors,
say just one thing about drafts: I *hate* modifications to documents
which do not include change-bars, and aren't diff'able. By inference,
I *hate* to have to reformat documents so they can be worked with.
I too have had my share of problems with the way the MIME document has been
handled as a document, but let's get one thing straight right now. We all
volunteer our time to work on this stuff. Nathaniel volunteered his time and
his resources to maintain the master copy of the document, and this was
generally agreed to. Doing it this way imposed some restrictions on how the
document was handled. If we had it to do over we'd probably do it differently
(I'm sure Nathaniel agrees with this), but making such a change now is
impractical. Moreover, the resulting document is in conformance with the
guidelines for RFCs, and as such there's nothing formally wrong here for you to
complain about.
But since we're airing our differences here, let me also say that I'm not
exactly thrilled with you either. You, sir, are a blatherskite. Your postings
offer much heat but virtually no light. You have found one minor syntactic
detail in RichText that you object to. You have paraded this detail around and
indulged in histrionics and vituperative speech about it in many messages. This
attitude is both childish and silly, and it serves to nullify any valid
technical content in your postings.
Worse, upon further examination (which I for one refused to do simply because I
felt that such a trivial issue was not worth getting sucked into at this stage)
it now seems that you were dead wrong from the beginning! I'm pleased to hear
that this is embarassing to you. It should be.
In any case, you had plenty of time to review this material over the past year
and provide useful, positive feedback. But you chose not to, and indeed, you
appear to be quite proud of the fact that you didn't "soil your hands" with MIME
earlier. That is of course your perogative, but now you want us to take you
seriously when the time for picking of nits is long past. I am not prepared to
make this concession even for people whose opinions I respect and value, and
you may rest assured that I don't think of you as such a person.
One point of general agreement in Santa Fe was that anything that getting MIME
finished was of paramount importance, and that any modifications that could not
be made quickly and easily were not going to be considered. Several changes
have been proposed since then, and as far as I know they either turned out to
be quick and easy and were incorporated or they turned out to involve some
debate and were dropped for this reason. Some of these proposals were good
ones, but they were not something that could be accomodated at this point in
the process.
An impression I've had since I read the first draft has been
strongly reinforced: This stuff is not standards material. No wonder
nobody have cared to scrutinize it. God knows how many other quiet
changes with massive impact have sneaked into this third draft.
This is simply more blather churned out from your freerunning emotional mill.
There were no quiet changes with massive impact. The notion that this
particular change was massive is nothing short of puerile, and I will not
dignify it with further argument. It was also not quiet -- you quoted this note
yourself:
| 7. Fixed the richtext-to-text translator to handle nested
| comments properly.
It sounds to me like Nathaniel properly and correctly documented this change in
the revision list. This directly contradicts your assertion that changes like
this "sneaked into this third draft", and leaves your entire line of reasoning
without any evidence as a basis.
The current draft still has problems with the comment "element,"
since it ignores anything found within it, including other unmatched
tags, and that's not good. I'm still working on the mods.
Once again, this is trivial syntactic sugar, and such changes should not be
considered at this stage in the process.
Ned