undocumented, and unstable. I hope we have consensus on that.
Sorry, no such consensus.
No problem. We've taken your tip and redefined consensus to exclude
anyone who disagrees with us.
I don't see why the editor you use needs to be open-standard.
Actually, I don't care what editor you use and I doubt that anyone else
does, either. I do care quite a lot what document formats you expect me
to deal with, and for reasons that other people have already explained,
undocumented, unstable, proprietary formats are non-starters for archival
documents such as RFCs.
More seriously, Word is the only commonly used editor with an integrated
tracking mechanism. I assume that even the purists who insist on nroff
occasionally write an ID with others.
Indeed we do, and we appreciate the fact that Emacs integrates so well
with RCS and CVS.
What I see here is severe confusion between tools and formats, and a lack
of clarity about input and output formats. I happen to write entire books
with other authors and editors, and although I am often stuck using Word
as an input format because that is the only editor they know, I cannot
begin to tell you how badly Word stinks for the purpose, particularly if I
need to do something with a document other than print it out. I have
written whole books in subset troff and then mechanically translated it to
other formats such as RTF for the Word crowd, because the tools I can use
on ASCII files with explicit markup are so much better than the feeble set
that work on Word files.
Of the various additional formats people have proposed, the only one that
makes sense for I-D's is RFC2629 XML. It's well specified, and it's ASCII
underneath so we can be confident it'll be readable in the future even if
our tools get lost. If you want to use Word to edit it, fine, go hire
someone to write a Word converter for it. (Best not to say "oh, that
would cost too much" unless you want to hear a whole lot of snickering.)
Since XML can be kind of hard to read, PDF/A is a reasonable alternate
presentation format, but I would be happier if every PDF/A I-D and RFC had
to come with an XML original so we can edit it reasonably.
Regards,
John Levine, johnl(_at_)iecc(_dot_)com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet
for Dummies",
Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://www.johnlevine.com, Mayor
"I shook hands with Senators Dole and Inouye," said Tom, disarmingly.
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