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?
Good guess, but wrong. If you do that, you will still generally get
various non-ASCII quotes and punctuation marks unless you carefully
configure your WP program not to insert smart quotes or whatever they call
it.
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.
Right. Again, you've figured it out, but most people haven't. I write
books in emacs with nroff-like markup, but my editors consider me pretty
strange. Lucky for them, I have scripts to turn my stuff into RTF which
works with the the tools they use. As many people have pointed out, the
world has moved on since 1980. (No, I'm not suggesting the IETF use Word.)
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.
Are you assuming that the only way to write XML is by hand? Aw, come on.
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.
Now I'm confused. Even though the RFC Editor mostly uses XML internally,
they don't publish the XML, and there is a hand-edit stop between the XML
and the final output. If we could agree that the final XML was
authoritative, and if necessary let them hire someone to fix xmlrfc so it
can produce the text version without hand editing or postprocessing, that
would be a big step forward.
R's,
John
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