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Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-02 01:20:45

On Jul 1, 2009, at 10:58 AM, Tony Hain wrote:

An alternative would be for some xml expert to fix xml2rfc to parse through the xml output of Word. If that happened, then the configuration options described in RFC 3285 would allow for wysiwyg editing, and I would update 3285 to reflect the xml output process. I realize that is a vendor specific option, but it happens to be a widely available one.


Reasons for wanting more than just plain text documents is to permit inclusion of charts, graphs, and tables, for a visual society. A safe way to provide this type of output using stable open-source code would be with roff preprocessors, like eqn, pic, tbl.

Word's closed code is continuously changing. Availability of this closed application depends upon OS compatibility and version regressions. Both are moving targets. In addition, Word formats permit inclusion of potentially destructive scripts within highly flexible and obfuscating structures. troff normally outputs .ps and is supported by various utilities like X viewers in open source. Unix based OSs like OSX and Linux still support this document format, where grohtml can generate HTML output. The disadvantage of using the roff approach has been a lack of IETF boilerplate pre-processors. Merging XML structures could be combined with powerful roff presentation utilities to generate IETF documents.

In many respects, roff offers simpler and proven stable formats. The present xml2rfc utilities do not offer wysiwyg. Combining custom pre- processors and visualization utilities, the roff suite offers greater security, stability and versatility for all OSes and media presentations types, along with iterative wysiwyg modes of operation. There would be little difference using roff tools from using xml2rfc, however the results could show a marked visual improvement. A desire for security might even foster a resurgence in roff tools to leverage proven and stable document generation.

Everything old is new again.

-Doug




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