Patrick,
Thank you for your most helpful pointer:
I recently had my first experience using the setup described by
Marshall Rose in rfc2629 (Writing I-Ds and RFCs using XML) and was
very pleased. You should be able to create the XML base in Word (or
whatever) and use the referenced tools to produce both conforming text
and html from the same base.
The tools referenced (xml2rfc) and the self-documenting rfc2629.*ml
are presently at:
http://xml.resource.org/authoring
If you can't run the tools on your platform there is a website that
you just submit the XML to and it will generate either text or HTML
as output.
http://xml.resource.org
This system is very elegant, and I think it addresses Vernon Schryver's
astute points on the topic, with which I agree completely except that I
don't think it is politically incorrect to accomodate "the fad format
of the day" because there are usually good reasons for popular choices.
Cheers,
James