Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required
On 09-07-02 1:00 AM, Randy Presuhn randy_pres...@mindspring.com wrote: One of the advantages of nroff input is that it *is* human readable. (To me it seems much easier to read than HTML, but that's not the issue here.) To generate formatted output (in a variety of possible formats) the freely- available groff program works well. Yes, and that is what I used for many many years until I got tired of saving to a temporary files and to use command line in endless iterations until I got all page breaks and other formatting exactly as I wanted them. I always wanted a tool where I could have the .nroff version and the text version in two parallel windows, to immediately see the effect of any changes in .nroff, hence I wrote my own. Mostly for the fun of it. But the more I use that feature, the more I learned to like it end depend on it. /Stefan ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required
On 2009-07-01 22:38 Martin Rex said the following: While I participated IETF Meetings in 1995-98, I often used pstools to create printed copies (2-up) of RFCs and Internet Drafts for reading while travelling and during meetings (didn't have a laptop). I used a wrapping perl-script because it was a little difficult to cope with some documents (varying page lengths and no page feed control character, plus occasionally Word-corrupted quote characters). Maybe the IETF could provide a conversion page on their Web-Server that can convert RFCs and Internet Drafts on the fly from their original ASCII-form into page-formatted PDF files, something like you post an URL in a Form, it gives you back a PDF. Yes. Something like this already exists, has been available as an online service since 2005, and was created explicitly to help people print documents: http://tools.ietf.org/pdf/ Regards, Henrik ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
RE: More liberal draft formatting standards required
Have a look at Dave Mills recent remarks on the NTP list : https://lists.ntp.org/pipermail/ntpwg/2009-June/001519.html Due to his diminished eyesight he can't handle the text of the document he is co-authoring without significant preprocessing. Y(J)S -Original Message- From: ietf-boun...@ietf.org [mailto:ietf-boun...@ietf.org] On Behalf Of Melinda Shore Sent: Thursday, July 02, 2009 02:23 To: Randy Presuhn Cc: IETF Discussion Mailing List Subject: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required Randy Presuhn wrote: I don't know. I prefer vi. You can run nroff on a buffer inside of both vi and emacs and get the output in another buffer. I've read internet drafts on a variety of handheld devices, from the old Sharp Wizards to Palm Pilots to a Blackberry, and I very much appreciate having a lowest-common-denominator document format. The only drawback has been the fixed line length - it can be slightly annoying for text but it renders ascii graphics completely useless on a narrower screen. On balance I think it's a reasonable tradeoff, though. And personally, I'm grateful that such a wide variety of tools can be used to generate conforming drafts - I think that it helps keep the process just a little more open. Melinda ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required
On 2 jul 2009, at 10:47, Yaakov Stein wrote: Due to his diminished eyesight he can't handle the text of the document he is co-authoring without significant preprocessing. Ok if we're going to have this discussion again: PDF is a way to display documents on the screen the same way that would appear on paper. Since screen and paper have different limitations, that usually entails pretty significant compromises. It's also extremely hard to build home grown tools to scrape PDF files. Even copy/paste from PDF is a challenge. So making PDF the authoritative version (let alone the only version) we create more problems than we solve. Exit PDF. A much better solution would be HTML, if it's sufficiently constrained. HTML allows for the reflowing of text, solving issues with text and screen sizes. It's also extremely widely implemented, so it's easy to display reasonably well without special tools. It also allows for semantic tagging, allowing for easy scraping. Last but not least, just filter out anything between and and replace a few xxx; sequences and you're back to plain text. We could probably even format RFCs such that if you remove the HTML, you're left with the current ASCII format. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
RE: More liberal draft formatting standards required
The limitations of ASCII format have been discussed here numerous times. For example, see the lengthy thread last year on draft-ash-alt-formats (now expired). Many people have proposed modern approaches that comply with the constraints. Going back a generation or two to nroff seems to me to be a step in the wrong direction. Y(J)S -Original Message- From: Douglas Otis [mailto:do...@mail-abuse.org] Sent: Thursday, July 02, 2009 08:19 To: alh-i...@tndh.net Cc: 'Theodore Tso'; Yaakov Stein; 'IETF Discussion Mailing List' Subject: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required 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 ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required
Douglas Otis dotis at mail dash abuse dot org wrote: 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... I didn't hear anyone ask to make evil Word from evil Microsoft the standard format for I-Ds and RFCs. I did hear a suggestion to enhance xml2rfc so it can interpret the XML generated by evil Word. The resulting code generated by xml2rfc would presumably have all of the evilness purged. -- Doug Ewell * Thornton, Colorado, USA * RFC 4645 * UTN #14 http://www.ewellic.org http://www1.ietf.org/html.charters/ltru-charter.html http://www.alvestrand.no/mailman/listinfo/ietf-languages ˆ ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required
Doug Ewell wrote: Douglas Otis dotis at mail dash abuse dot org wrote: 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... I didn't hear anyone ask to make evil Word from evil Microsoft the standard format for I-Ds and RFCs. I did hear a suggestion to enhance xml2rfc so it can interpret the XML generated by evil Word. The resulting code generated by xml2rfc would presumably have all of the evilness purged. ... Just because xml2rfc happens to use a base XML format doesn't mean it can be easily changed to use a different XML vocabulary. A conversion tool (reading Word, generating xml2rfc XML source) would make more sense, IMHO. That being said, I looked at this several years ago, and the 2003 Word XML format was a pain to process, and also lacks much of the interesting stuff (such as blbliographical information). BR, Julian ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required
On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 2:01 AM, Iljitsch van Beijnumiljit...@muada.com wrote: A much better solution would be HTML, if it's sufficiently constrained. HTML allows for the reflowing of text, solving issues with text and screen sizes. It's also extremely widely implemented, so it's easy to display reasonably well without special tools. It also allows for semantic tagging, allowing for easy scraping. This seems obviously true everywhere outside the IETF mailing list. Last but not least, just filter out anything between and and replace a few xxx; sequences and you're back to plain text. We could probably even format RFCs such that if you remove the HTML, you're left with the current ASCII format. Yes and no. Yes, removing markup leaves useful text, but no, it wouldn't be anything like the line-broken, paginated, headered-and-footered, legacy text format. -Tim ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required
Tim Bray wrote: On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 2:01 AM, Iljitsch van Beijnumiljit...@muada.com wrote: A much better solution would be HTML, if it's sufficiently constrained. HTML allows for the reflowing of text, solving issues with text and screen sizes. It's also extremely widely implemented, so it's easy to display reasonably well without special tools. It also allows for semantic tagging, allowing for easy scraping. This seems obviously true everywhere outside the IETF mailing list. The showstopper has always been with figures which need to do in separate files. How do you manipulate the collection of files as a single object? At least with pdf you know you have the whole thing. Stewart ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required
At 10:19 PM -0700 7/1/09, Douglas Otis wrote: for wanting more than just plain text documents is to permit inclusion of charts, graphs, and tables, for a visual society It seems to me that where this discussion has faltered before is on whether this is, in fact, a requirement. In the past, multiple people have argued that switching to a mode in which understanding the figures is necessary to understanding the protocol would be a step away from clarity, searchability, and inclusiveness. We have agreed to do it in some places in the past, but I believe there has been no previous rough consensus that it should be the default. If we are going to re-run this discussion, can we first check on the consensus on this requirement? If we don't agree here, the chance of this run concluding seems no better than any of the previous runs at the problem. The discussion just fragments into tool use, printer capabilities, and various distractions. regards, Ted Hardie ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required
On Jul 2, 2009, at 12:16 PM, Ted Hardie wrote: At 10:19 PM -0700 7/1/09, Douglas Otis wrote: for wanting more than just plain text documents is to permit inclusion of charts, graphs, and tables, for a visual society It seems to me that where this discussion has faltered before is on whether this is, in fact, a requirement. You are exactly correct, and I can recall several interminable discussions of this. To save time, I would suggest adopting the Patent Office rules on Perpetual Motion. People advocating for a change to facilitate figures (or to allow complicated math, such as tensor analysis) should have an existence proof, i.e., a document that requires the change to be published. (A document that left the IETF to be published elsewhere for this reason would also do.) Regards Marshall In the past, multiple people have argued that switching to a mode in which understanding the figures is necessary to understanding the protocol would be a step away from clarity, searchability, and inclusiveness. We have agreed to do it in some places in the past, but I believe there has been no previous rough consensus that it should be the default. If we are going to re-run this discussion, can we first check on the consensus on this requirement? If we don't agree here, the chance of this run concluding seems no better than any of the previous runs at the problem. The discussion just fragments into tool use, printer capabilities, and various distractions. regards, Ted Hardie ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf Regards Marshall Eubanks CEO / AmericaFree.TV ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required
On 2 jul 2009, at 17:05, Stewart Bryant wrote: A much better solution would be HTML This seems obviously true everywhere outside the IETF mailing list. The showstopper has always been with figures which need to do in separate files. How do you manipulate the collection of files as a single object? Multiple files seems problematic. However, we can stick with ASCII art even if we adopt HTML. ┏ ━ ━ ━ ━ ━ ━ ━ ━ ━ ━ ━ ━ ━━━┯━━━┓ ┃ An influx of a (hopefully limited) set │ of unicode symbols┃ ┃ could allow for more expressiveness in │ this area.┃ ┗ ━ ━ ━ ━ ━ ━ ━ ━ ━ ━ ━ ━ ━━━┷━━━┛___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required
Iljitsch, That box shows up as complete gibberish in a plain-text mail reader (pine in my case), which sort of proves the point about ASCII. What you sent was certainly not ASCII. Ole Ole J. Jacobsen Editor and Publisher, The Internet Protocol Journal Cisco Systems Tel: +1 408-527-8972 Mobile: +1 415-370-4628 E-mail: o...@cisco.com URL: http://www.cisco.com/ipj On Thu, 2 Jul 2009, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote: On 2 jul 2009, at 17:05, Stewart Bryant wrote: A much better solution would be HTML This seems obviously true everywhere outside the IETF mailing list. The showstopper has always been with figures which need to do in separate files. How do you manipulate the collection of files as a single object? Multiple files seems problematic. However, we can stick with ASCII art even if we adopt HTML. ??? ??? An influx of a (hopefully limited) set ??? of unicode symbols??? ??? could allow for more expressiveness in ??? this area.??? ??? ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required
Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote: On 2 jul 2009, at 17:05, Stewart Bryant wrote: A much better solution would be HTML This seems obviously true everywhere outside the IETF mailing list. The showstopper has always been with figures which need to do in separate files. How do you manipulate the collection of files as a single object? Multiple files seems problematic. However, we can stick with ASCII art even if we adopt HTML. ... Indeed. Let's keep these discussions separate. BR, Julian ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required
On Jul 2, 2009, at 9:22 AM, Marshall Eubanks wrote: On Jul 2, 2009, at 12:16 PM, Ted Hardie wrote: At 10:19 PM -0700 7/1/09, Douglas Otis wrote: for wanting more than just plain text documents is to permit inclusion of charts, graphs, and tables, for a visual society It seems to me that where this discussion has faltered before is on whether this is, in fact, a requirement. You are exactly correct, and I can recall several interminable discussions of this. To save time, I would suggest adopting the Patent Office rules on Perpetual Motion. People advocating for a change to facilitate figures (or to allow complicated math, such as tensor analysis) should have an existence proof, i.e., a document that requires the change to be published. (A document that left the IETF to be published elsewhere for this reason would also do.) What appears to be missed in these conversations represents a dissatisfaction of the generation tools and output quality, which is easily shared. There is good reason to avoid closed source generation tools, however the IETF has already employed and permitted the use of roff inputs and outputs, which appears to offer a reasonable means to satisfy the many requirements already in place. A suggestion to use Word XML outputs as a means of providing WISIWYG operation misses what is currently in place within xml2rfc needed to generate tables, state diagrams, and graphs. Yes, these elements are _currently_ contained within existing RFCs, but in ASCII form. Even though these elements are structured using ASCII, textual processing must still accommodate special handling of these clumsy visual elements. Although I am not blind, the simple instructions required by roff tools should allow those visually impaired a superior means for understanding the intent of visual graphics, rather than guessing what a series of white-space and characters are attempting to convey within diagrams or equations. In addition, there are currently several RFCs already created using roff, as were my first attempts at writing I-Ds. Due to IETF's current level of support for xml2rfc, this mode of input now offers an easier means to generate acceptable output. IMHO, roff tools can still offer higher quality output that is more compatible with various presentation media than outputs generated from xml2rfc. Perhaps the IETF may wish to better retain the older roff methods by offering better boilerplate and processing support for this currently acceptable method for generating I-Ds and RFCs. A wiki style web-page with IETF custom roff pre-preprocessors could facilitate roff inputs for the creation of ID and RFC documents. The availability of roff to html output should also make creating previews as a type of iterative WISIWYG mode of creation possible. This would be no different than the steps used with xml2rfc. IIRC, .ps generated from roff tools are still acceptable inputs as well, although I expect the current publishing automation is likely to balk at output from these older methods. Too bad though. -Doug ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required
To save time, I would suggest adopting the Patent Office rules on Perpetual Motion. People advocating for a change to facilitate figures (or to allow complicated math, such as tensor analysis) should have an existence proof, i.e., a document that requires the change to be published. (A document that left the IETF to be published elsewhere for this reason would also do.) RFC1305 which states Note: This document consists of an approximate rendering in ASCII of the PostScript document of the same name. It is provided for convenience and for use in searches, etc. However, most tables, figures, equations and captions have not been rendered and the pagination and section headings are not available. - Stewart ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required
On Jul 2, 2009, at 2:01 PM, Stewart Bryant wrote: To save time, I would suggest adopting the Patent Office rules on Perpetual Motion. People advocating for a change to facilitate figures (or to allow complicated math, such as tensor analysis) should have an existence proof, i.e., a document that requires the change to be published. (A document that left the IETF to be published elsewhere for this reason would also do.) RFC1305 which states Note: This document consists of an approximate rendering in ASCII of the PostScript document of the same name. It is provided for convenience and for use in searches, etc. However, most tables, figures, equations and captions have not been rendered and the pagination and section headings are not available. Yes, I seem to remember this one from before... However, it was a while ago. You could argue it was one-off. You could also argue that if one document out of every few thousand needs something extra, that should be handled by some waiver process. I have an existence proof of the possibility of such waivers... What I hear in these discussions can get translated into a lot of it would be nice and little if any it is essential that. Changes to existing procedures tend to get driven by it is essential that, which is my point. A working group saying that the existing format restrictions are severely hindering their work would count for a lot here. Regards Marshall - Stewart Regards Marshall Eubanks CEO / AmericaFree.TV ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required
On 7/2/09 at 4:05 PM +0100, Stewart Bryant wrote: Tim Bray wrote: On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 2:01 AM, Iljitsch van Beijnumiljit...@muada.com wrote: A much better solution would be HTML, if it's sufficiently constrained. Or, gee, we could generalize to a very constrained XML format.ohwait I certainly agree that some text-based markup with reasonable tools for folks like Dave Mills (and others) to easily convert to a readable (or listenable) format is absolutely essential. As Dave put it, the current RFC format is unfriendly, unnecessary, possibly unethical and just plain wrong. I'd remove the possibly. The showstopper has always been with figures which need to do in separate files. How do you manipulate the collection of files as a single object? At least with pdf you know you have the whole thing. We've actually got a standard for that: RFC 2387 and its brethren. pr -- Pete Resnick http://www.qualcomm.com/~presnick/ Qualcomm Incorporated - Direct phone: (858)651-4478, Fax: (858)651-1102 ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required
Hi - From: Stefan Santesson ste...@aaa-sec.com To: Donald Eastlake d3e...@gmail.com; IETF Discussion Mailing List ietf@ietf.org Sent: Wednesday, July 01, 2009 3:42 PM Subject: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required How do you translate the .nroff formatted document to a readable text document? One of the advantages of nroff input is that it *is* human readable. (To me it seems much easier to read than HTML, but that's not the issue here.) That depends on the HTML. We use a stripped down XHTML format for our documentation sources that I find far more readable than nroff source. I also like being able to syntax check early and often - all three of the editors I routinely use have XML syntax checkers built in. But I find xml2rfc format even easier to read than either stripped down HTML or nroff. Regardless of the format you use, I believe the key is to realize that you spend more of your time looking at the input file and not the output file, and it pays not to be a slob. I've gotten XML source for drafts from people who seem to get this, but I've also gotten stuff that was so awful I really could not understand how they put up with it. But the real difference is in the type of markup. When I'm writing I want to focus on the content, not on presentation details. Stripped down HTML is OK in this regard, but not nearly as good as a format that focuses on the structural controls I need, not the presentation details I don't care about. IMO xml2rfc doesn't go far enough in this regard. I think the mistake many people make is in worrying about the presentation details too soon, too often, and too much. In a very real sense that's what the RFC Editor is *for*. To generate formatted output (in a variety of possible formats) the freely- available groff program works well. Um, yeah, and try installing that on some only vaguely UNIXish system it hasn't been compiled on before. Been there, tried that, ended up using ssh to run it on a systemm where it was preinstalled. I've also have issues with variations between different nroff processors and different versions of macro packages. When xml2rfc became available I converted everything to it. Vast improvement, never going back. Ned ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
ISOC Fellowship to the IETF - seeking applicants for IETF 76 and IETF 77
[I am sorry if you receive this more than once.] Dear Colleagues, The Internet Society has announced that it is seeking applications for the next round of the ISOC Fellowship to the IETF program. The program offers engineers from developing countries fellowships that fund the cost of attending an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) meeting. As you know, the IETF is the Internet's premier standards-making body, responsible for the development of protocols used in IP-based networks. IETF participants represent an international community of network designers, operators, vendors, and researchers involved in the technical operation of the Internet and the continuing evolution of Internet architecture. Fellowships will be awarded through a competitive application process. The Internet Society is currently accepting fellowship applications for the next two IETF meetings: * IETF 76 being held in Hiroshima, Japan, 8-13 November 2009 * IETF 77 being held in Anaheim, USA, 21-26 March 2010 Up to six fellowships will be awarded for each IETF meeting. Full details on the ISOC Fellowship to the IETF, including how to apply, are located on the ISOC website at : http://www.isoc.org/educpillar/fellowship Fellowship applications for both IETF meetings are due by 31 July 2009. The Internet Society formally launched the ISOC Fellowship to the IETF program in January 2007 after successfully piloting the program during 2006 at IETF 66 in Montreal and IETF 67 in San Diego. Forty seven individuals from 29 countries have participated in the program since its inception. I encourage you to pass information about this program to individuals involved in your regional operators' groups that have a keen interest in the Internet standardisation activities of the IETF. You also may consider being a reference for the applicant. If you have questions, please do not hesiate to contact Connie Kendig ken...@isoc.org or Mirjam Kuehne m...@isoc.org. Kind Regards, Mirjam Kuehne ISOC ___ IETF-Announce mailing list IETF-Announce@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf-announce
