This draft is a bad answer to a very real and important problem.
We are willing to entertain constructive comments as to a good answer.
But I want to add one: authorizing an *output* format without the
corresponding *input* format (the "source")
would be a very dangerous step away from open formats.
We were forced into specifying ONLY an output format by comments on THIS
LIST.
We originally tried specifying OpenDocument, various commercial
word-processors, etc.
BTW, the draft completely fails to mention that there are text formats
which are better than ordinary raw ASCII
and able to be automatically translated to a nice rendering (typical
candidates are LaTeX for equations and Graphviz for state machines).
I personally an a TeX-adict. If the IETF would adopt TeX input as
normative
then we could accomplish all that we want - great looking equations,
decent graphics, etc.
And we could easily generate PDF.
Of course, this would eliminate the need for XML notation and tools
as there are TeX packages that are much simpler to use than XML2RFC.
So I guess there is even less chance of getting that idea off the
runway.
Y(J)S
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