Re: Last Call: 'Proposed Experiment: Normative Formatin AdditiontoASCII

Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:
> On 17-jun-2006, at 0:18, Joe Touch wrote:
>
> > It's worth distinguishing the search for alternate normative output
> > formats from the search for a standard input format.
> I think the mistake is to make the output format normative. If we make
> the input format normative and publish that we're out of the woods:
> obviously the input format is editable, and if it's sufficiently (but
> not overly) well-defined output formats can be generated as desired.
Forcing the input format means one of two things:

        - edit source code (argh - back to the stone age)
        - force a limited set of editing software

I find neither useful nor productive.

> > > I'm very partial to xml2rfc,
> I'm sorry to be so negative, but I hate it. The stupid thing can't even
> handle my name properly so I have to live with what it does or edit the
> result manually.
I gave up on it when cut/paste of blocks was more likely to render the
result uncompilable and impossible to repair.

> XML2RFC once made me miss a draft deadline by choking on some XML I
> wrote without saying why or where, leaving me with an impossible
> debugging task. Formatting drafts in vi may take longer on average than
> working with xml2rfc but it's more deterministic.
I found the new Word template let me focus on what it was I was writing,
and freed me from the arcane details of how it was encoded or processed.
That, IMO, is the purpose of the input format. Anything that's less
freeing is a step backwards.

Joe

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