--On Thursday, 25 May, 2006 07:18 -0500 "Stephen Hayes (TX/EUS)"
<stephen(_dot_)hayes(_at_)ericsson(_dot_)com> wrote:
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
...
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.
Stephen, I routinely complain about too much editing -- if not
on every document I submit for RFC publication, at least most of
them. I believe that, in the last couple of years there has
been a trend toward more editing that I consider gratuitous,
e.g., changing one correct and consistent style to another one.
So I may well be the source of some of the complaints you heard.
On the other hand, I'm appalled by the editorial and
presentation quality of some of the documents that I've seen go
to the RFC Editor, even after Last Call and IESG signoff.
In my opinion, absent something that the document skirts, the
"current highly restrictive reading" goes much too far. Yes, I
understand the desire to counterbalance both natural tendencies
and some history of over-editing. But, to the extent to which
this document is expected, post-last-call, to form part of the
basis for solicitation of people who are interested in doing the
job and selection from among those people, and then of a
contract with the selected party, I believe it goes _much_ too
far: that degree of restrictiveness is simply not what we want
or need, IMO.
The exception case mentioned above would involve a shift to
doing substantially all editing prior to IETF Last Call and
doing it again if textual changes are made after Last Call, so
that the document that is approved is the document that is
published. That is more or less the practice in a number of
other standards bodies. For reasons of both cost and process,
it has never been embraced here and I don't take anything in
TechSpec as either forcing that model or as otherwise assuring
that documents that come into the process are of a quality that
would justify very restrictive text about post-editing.
regards,
john
_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
Ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf