An interesting part of the current text format is that it is defined in
a very simple way: so many lines, so many columns, that's about it.
Christian,
The format has never been that simple and it has gotten increasingly complex
in recent years.
The format requirements include lines/page, headers, boilerplate, author and
title information in specific forms, citations in two sets(!), a security
section, and probably a few more.
ALL OF THESE ARE PART OF THE FORMAT!
Getting them correct is proving increasingly difficult in free-text. In
xml2rfc it is vastly easier.
For us to require that a simple ascii representation always be available
makes quite a lot of sense. To retain it as the purported input form does
not, especially when it is not really the input form.
What we really are talking about here is moving from nroff to xml2rfc.
The fact that the nroff component can be kept out of the sight of authors is
one of the reasons our publication costs are about US$ 1M/year.
d/
--
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
<http://bbiw.net>
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