Ned, as an AD I read dozens of documents a week and offer suggestions on
those documents. These changes frequently require negotiation, but for AD
reviews specifically, not having change tracking means that if I offer a heavy
edit on a particular document, there's a good chance I'm just wasting my time,
because the author won't bother to integrate it.
Not only was I an AD for four years, when I came onboard I inherited a very
large backlog of documents. So I'm well aware of situation ADs face.
And as for the issue if integrating extensive changes suggested by ADs, having
been on both sides of this I will again repeat that I don't think proper
tooling is the dominant issue here.
Something that makes this as easy as change tracking in MS word would
_substantially_ reduce my workload while at the same time increasing my
effectiveness. I agree that if you are only editing one document every so
often, it won't make much difference.
De gustibus non est disputandum. I find MS Word change tracking to be useless
at best for our kind of work. A small part of that is what I view as a crappy
UI, but the biggest problem is that using it properly requires a certain
discipline most Word users don't appear to possess.
Maybe there's a tool out there that sorts this out, but I've never encountered
it.
The other thing an easy tool might do is make it easier for IETF participants
to usefully do reviews, meaning that we might get more reviews. It would in
particular make it much easier for working groups to collaborate on documents,
rather than leaving it to one or two designated authors.
(BTW, I am _not_ proposing that we use Microsoft Word in the toolchain, nor
that git isn't useful. I am not a fan of Word, and I am a fan of git. The
point of mentioning Word is that change tracking is something it does right;
the point of saying that git isn't good enough for this application is that it
isn't, not to say that it isn't good enough for other applications.)
On that point I'm afraid I simply disagree. I actually do like using Word or
Word-equivalents for some things. But not change tracking. And I am
emphatically NOT a fan of git. But I'd use it for change tracking long before
I'd use Word.
Ned