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Re: Last Call: 'Proposed Experiment: Normative Format in Addition to ASCII Text' to Experimental RFC (draft-ash-alt-formats)

2006-06-16 09:10:25


Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:
On Thu, Jun 15, 2006 at 09:01:22AM -0700,
 Joe Touch <touch(_at_)ISI(_dot_)EDU> wrote 
 a message of 34 lines which said:

IMHO, IETF should always publish the "source" of its documents
(the current RFC process is far from perfect in that respect).
Which source

The source. The author certainly knows it (yes, I'm aware that the RFC
editor performs changes which are not backported in the author's copy,
a really annoying thing; that's why I said the current process is
bad).

That's part of the problem. The other is that 'source' is useful only
with a snapshot of the tools that are used to process it. XML2RFC is a
moving target in that regard, as is Word.

...
Why would inter-source conversion be more useful than cut-and-paste?

I don't have experience with MS-Word but (re)generating the RFC 2629
source from the ASCII version is a big pain (while there are automatic
converters, for instance from *roff to XML and, of course, from one
XML to the other).

In Word it's fairly simple to paste, remove the leftside indent, and
rewrap the paragraphs quickly. Setting heading types, lists, and figures
can be automated with scripts, but I haven't bothered to do that; it's
sufficiently quick to do that manually, IMO.

I have heard there are tools to back-port output to XML or nroff
approximations which, like Word paste, often need manual adjusting, but
haven't used them myself.

Joe

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