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Re: Why the normative form of IETF Standards is ASCII

2010-03-17 10:49:04
On 12 mrt 2010, at 6:58, John Levine wrote:

Indeed, I know plenty of people these days who have no idea today how
to produce an ASCII file with only tab, CR, and LF formatting
characters.

Type. Save as text. How hard is that?

I have actually written a few drafts that way. The text part isn't hard, but 
the hard breaks at every line are, and the hard breaks at every page even more 
so. Tools do create those don't exist in today's world.

The current
process uses input and output formats that are similar enough that
people wrongly think they're the same, even though of course they are
not.  Many people seem to assume that if we picked a new output
format, we would necessarily change the input format to be "the same"
as the output format, which I think would be a terrible idea.  The
input formats need to be reasonably easy for non-experts to create,

Which it is not. xml2rfc is very hard to use for anyone who has otherwise no 
experience with XML just because it's XML (the proper nesting and terminating 
are hell) and also because at least 50% of the xml2rfc commands aren't 
documented.

I don't understand why we would even need to discuss the output formats, you 
can get HTML and PDF without trouble, even though the text version is 
authoritative. It's the input that's the problem.
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