On 29 jun 2009, at 0:34, John C Klensin wrote:
I've had few of those problems when I edit with emacs or its
clones. I guess that doesn't qualify as "today's tools" in your
book but, if so, your issue is much broader than xml2rfc.
There are probably IETF contributors who are younger than emacs.
Although I am reasonably familiar with a couple of old school text
editors (vi and pico), as far as I am aware those don't handle hard
line endings transparently, which is the ultimate source of most of
the problems.
The problem is that the Secretariat likes (or has been told to)
published a page count as part of the I-D announcement and that they
can't figure out the page count without page breaks.
They could publish a word count instead. In most areas of writing word
counts are used to evaluate the length of a text.
Line breaks are because a situation in which some documents have
them and others interfere with a different set of reading (and
printing) tools. Just as you want to be able to say "I want to be
able to submit drafts without using xml2rfc to format them", I want
to be able to say "I don't want my drafts to require processing
through some display formatter
It's true that you can't load a text file without hard line breaks in
a browser and have the browser wrap the lines. However, printing a
draft or RFC requires processing today as the page break characters no
longer seem to work these days. With soft line breaks you can easily
load the text into an editor and print from there.
before I can read them or have a discussion with someone else that
includes references to "Line M of Paragraph 2 of Section 5.2". I
also note that some of us are very dependent of diffs and the like
which also depend on well-defined lines. So your soft line break
requirement is the one that strikes me as completely unreasonable.
Well, creating line breaks is not exactly rocket science so it should
be easy enough to create a tool that breaks lines in a consistent way.
However, once the lines are broken editing and printing become harder
so I think the "official" version of a draft should have unbroken lines.
I'd be happier if xml2rfc permitted me to write something like:
<reference anchor="FooBar" status="later" />
Yes, this is the problem with XLM2RFC. It's trying to be way too
smart, usually unsuccessfully. So now I have to remember that I need
to call an experimental draft "exp", while just typing "experimental"
would be so much easier. Or it insists that it knows how to create my
full name from my first and last names, but of course it doesn't know
that in Dutch a last name on its own starting with "van" has the V
capitalized ("Van Beijnum") but if there are initials or first names
it's lower case ("I. van Beijnum"). Life is too short to battle with
your tools.
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