See inline.
Stephen Hayes
-----Original Message-----
From: Joel M. Halpern [mailto:joel(_at_)stevecrocker(_dot_)com]
Sent: Wednesday, May 24, 2006 3:17 PM
To: ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
Subject: Re: LC on draft-mankin-pub-req-08.txt
Reading this, a few items caught my eye.
The POSTEDIT requirements seem to be worded as if it is desirable to
minimize the changes that the document editor makes, or even the
changes the document editor can make. The general tone of "don't
mess with the words we have carefully honed" is
understandable. However, in practice many of the words have not been
carefully honed. And they need to be. For example, there is a
document I just reviewed to which my personal reaction is "this needs
massive editing." It is not technically wrong. But the language use
makes it hard for the reader to understand what is intended. I would
sincerely hope that if it is approved as-is by the IESG that the RFC
Editor would edit the document.
In general the editor has little or no way to tell which words are
"carefully crafted." I would hate to have a presumption that all the
words a sacrosanct.
I realize that the text calls out the special case of "don't touch a
letter of this", and even acknowledges that it is a rare case. But
the wording of the earlier text is not in line with
that. Specifically, POSTEDIT-4 reads "The IETF Technical editor
should refrain from changes to improve readability that may change
technical and consensus wording." This appears to be a directive
that prohibits almost all changes, since in a formal sense all the
words in an WG and IETF LC approved document are "consensus
wording." That leads to what I consider a bad situation where we
have essentially prohibited the editor from editing.
On a related note, POSTEDIT-3 seems to be inadvertently worded too
strongly. It prohibits changes which "introduce a substantial review
load but only provides incremental increase in the clarity of the
specification." However, by definition any change at all, even a
significant change that transforms a document from unintelligible to
highly readable, is always an "incremental increase in the clarity of
the specification."
Although the wording could be tuned to be more permissive, it's not possible to
satisfy everybody with the POSTEDIT requirements. People just tend to end up
at slightly different places along the "how much the technical publisher should
do" curve. People can point to examples with badly written documents that
needed considerable clean-up or examples where changes were done that added
little overall benefit to a document.
The natural tendency of a technical publisher will be to improve documents,
since to a large degree they view themselves as responsible for the output
quality. The current highly restrictive wording was selected to counterbalance
that tendency. The current wording also reflects that I heard more complaints
about too much editing than not enough editing.
With regard to the metrics, I think that it would be helpful to
separate the notion of having metrics from the specific values. I
would suggest moving the specific values to an appendix, with a
notation that these values are advisory and based on IETF perception
at the time of writing. I don't want to lose the numbers, but I
think that they have a different status as requirements than the
point that these time frames should be tracked, and should have well
understood targets. Separating this also allows for negotiation of
cost-benefit tradeoffs without violating "requirements."
I agree, the requirements to keep metrics and the recommended values for
metrics are different and should be distinguished in some way. I am not sure
an appendix is the best way, but some separation is needed.
As a minor matter, figure one is trying to make a useful statement,
but one of the headings caused me to have to spend more time staring
at the figure, rather than making things clearer. In the row labeled
"Actors", WGLC and IETF LC appear. Those are states, not
actors. Also, the action listed (Formal Reviewing) does not, as far
as I know, currently occur during those phases. The formal reviewing
occurs after IETF LC ends, during IESG deliberations.
I guess some minor surgery would be to change WGLC->WG, IETF LC-> IETF, and
Formal Reviewing-> Reviewing.
Yours,
Joel M. Halpern
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