Pete Resnick wrote:
Getting rid of a page-layout format as our authoritative form
is primary. Using characters that do not occur in English is next down
the list. Everything else is extra.
What is primary is to ensure that the revisable form can be easily read 30 years
from now when the original display-creation software is lost.
Making the revisable form be better than the simplistic ASCII we've used since
1969 is the second priority, not the first.
I'm all in favor of satisfying that second priority, but remain concerned that
enthusiasm for it loses sight of the importance of the first priority.
This suggests that it is not quite enough to say xml or xml2rfc, but that we
need to make sure the format of the submitted text is "directly" readable. This
makes a distinction between "readable" and "pretty". Pretty is quite helpful
for easy reading. But only helpful.
Any competent xml editing tool let's you create and save such a readable format,
but we can't take that for granted. If we are going to change official
requirements, we need them to mandate that the submitted version is as easily
and directly readable as what we are giving up. That means, prior to running
the file through an xml-savvy processor.
So we need to specify formatting requirements for the revisable form.
If we are going to move to something like xml2rfc as the official
revision/submission format -- and I do hope we do -- we need to specify rules
for the layout of the submitted files, so that those files can be comfortably
read with a character-display program that is not knowledge of the revision
structure.
d/
--
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net
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