Bob,
I am afraid you are injecting confusion. Use nroff for what? The RFC
Editor does not publish nroff, it publishes ASCII text. The tool we
use to prepare ASCII for publication happens to be nroff, because it is
simple, effective, and efficient.
1. As long as the RFC Editor uses a formatting language that is not in
common use, a translation into the format will be required. Translations
are never free, even when automated, and they often are problematic.
2. As long as the published version is free-form ascii, then revising a
document with tools that assist in document development, with such things as
automated formatting, will be problematic at best.
Hence, when authors can work on the authoritative text using THE SAME
structured form as is used by the RFC Editor, the community will experience
two significant benefits:
1. Reduced costs of RFC Editor processing, by virtue of not having to do the
translation and being able to have automated submission tools vet the
document against basic errors.
2. Reduced costs of document revision, by being able to start with an
attribute-rich format, rather than one lacking any attribute information at all.
The RFC Editor has experimented with using xml2rfc for this purpose,
and found it awkward and inefficent for producing properly formatted
ASCII text.
I do not recall seeing these problems discussed on the xml2rfc mailing list.
Have you attempted to get the problems fixed?
But the two issues of primary concern to the IETF should
be the acceptable input formats (currently ASCII text and/or RFC 2629
XML) and the desired publication format(s).
You left out:
The format of the authoritative version that is available for later
revision by potentially different authors
The issues under discussion should be: (1) whether the RFC Editor
should publish RFCs in some XML-based structural document descriptor
language, (2) whether this should be in particular the DTD defined in
RFC 2629, (3) whether an XML version should be co-authoritative with an
ASCII version or should be primary or secondary to the ASCII version,
(4) if an XML version is to be published as authoritative, how to
ensure that it is correct and consistent with the ASCII version, if
any.
that looks like a pretty good list, to me.
All this is independent of the fact that xml2rfc is a boon to authors.
That is true today, but it has little to do with the publication process
or the publication format.
That is one of my points.
The fact that it is independent actually causes problems, as noted above and
in previous postings.
d/
--
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
<http://bbiw.net>
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