Re: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-14 Thread Doug Otis
On Jul 13, 2009, at 7:58 PM, Doug Ewell wrote: Why on Earth would someone use Visual Basic within Word to write a utility to convert Microsoft Word ***XML*** documents to an IETF- acceptable format, when there are much better tools for processing XML? For a third-party application to

Re: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-14 Thread Julian Reschke
Doug Otis wrote: ... On Jul 13, 2009, at 1:10 PM, Julian Reschke wrote: The experimental version (http://xml.resource.org/experimental.html) is as stable as predecessor versions; the main reason it hasn't been released is that the authors (IMHO) expected more boilerplate changes to occur.

Re: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-14 Thread Iljitsch van Beijnum
On 14 jul 2009, at 11:20, Doug Otis wrote: For a third-party application to interpret the changing Word document format, even in XML form, would require extensive and ongoing support. In principle, yes. In practice this would probably not be a huge deal compared to what needs to happen

Re: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-13 Thread Douglas Otis
On Jul 12, 2009, at 4:42 PM, Doug Ewell wrote: This thread has been headed down the wrong path from the outset, as soon as Tony Hain wrote on July 1: An alternative would be for some xml expert to fix xml2rfc to parse through the xml output of Word. If that happened, then the

Re: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-13 Thread Iljitsch van Beijnum
On 13 jul 2009, at 21:56, Douglas Otis wrote: Visual Basic would represent a more likely tool, since it is already supported by the Word application. Only in some versions. In the latest MacOS version it's not supported. This makes one wonder whether there could be a better way. I think

Re: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-13 Thread Julian Reschke
Douglas Otis wrote: ... Use of xml2rfc conversions has uncovered some odd quirks. The tool does not cache bibliographic database selections. Either this works on-line, or the entire database needs to be local. Not to diminish the service offered by Carl Malamud, occasional sporadic

Re: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-13 Thread Phillip Hallam-Baker
Well one approach would be to simply write a spec for using MIME as an archive format for HTML and associated documents as has been supported in Internet Explorer for a decade. MHT is a very simple format that uses IETF standards in a very obvious way. We could probably get Firefox to add support

Re: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-13 Thread Doug Ewell
Douglas Otis dotis at mail dash abuse dot org wrote: ... The concern related to the use of the Word input format, which has changed in 97, 00, 02, 03, 07, and is likely again in 10, remains that of security. Changes are not always apparent, and even format documentation can not be relied

Re: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-12 Thread Sabahattin Gucukoglu
I just *knew* it was a mistake to Leave this thread for later ... On 3 Jul 2009, at 18:04, Pete Resnick wrote: On 7/3/09 at 10:16 AM +0200, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote: On 3 jul 2009, at 0:35, Pete Resnick wrote: A much better solution would be HTML, if it's sufficiently constrained. Or,

Re: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-12 Thread Byung-Hee HWANG
Doug Ewell d...@ewellic.org writes: Douglas Otis dotis at mail dash abuse dot org wrote: Reliance upon open source tools ensures the original RFCs and ID can be maintained by others, without confronting unresolvable compatibility issues. Whether a tool is open source or not has nothing to

Re: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-12 Thread Doug Ewell
Byung-Hee HWANG bh at izb dot knu dot ac dot kr wrote: Already, above, Douglas pointed out for your comments correctly. RFC format is different from a market share format by the purpose. Do you have been think about the word compatibility and standard? Here is IETF, not a market.. ;; This

Re: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-09 Thread james woodyatt
On Jul 3, 2009, at 08:07, Doug Ewell wrote: As always when this discussion occurs, there are at least three different issues swirling around: 1. ASCII-only vs. UTF-8 2. Plain text vs. higher-level formatting, for text flow and readability 3. Whether it is a good idea to include

Re: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-08 Thread Stefan Winter
Hi, You're heading into new territory, here. Right now IETF documents are written in English and they're If you allow a bit of nitpicking here: they cannot be written in all the labels the English language has to offer, and thus they can only be written in a *subset* of English. So a devil's

RE: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-08 Thread Dave Nelson
Naïve is a perfectly valid English word. (If your mail reader doesn't display this correctly: that's an i with two dots on top instead of one) Likewise is coup d'état an English word (e with accent). All loan words from French, but nontheless English words. Yes, but in importing such words

Re: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-08 Thread John C Klensin
--On Tuesday, July 07, 2009 23:01 +0200 Iljitsch van Beijnum iljit...@muada.com wrote: ... (We have a saying in Dutch: the soup is never eaten quite as hot as it is served = people are generally more reasonable than their intial positions suggest.) Experience with the recurrence of this

Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-08 Thread Phillip Hallam-Baker
Lets unpack this argument: In the serious publishing world there are editors who review prose and nit pick. Therefore all nit picking is evidence of serious publishing and all criticism comes from 'unpublishable wankers'. As a matter of record I am a published author, my editors at Addison

Re: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-07 Thread John C Klensin
--On Sunday, July 05, 2009 12:05 -0400 Melinda Shore melinda.sh...@gmail.com wrote: ... You're heading into new territory, here. Right now IETF documents are written in English and they're displayable on a wider variety of hardware than HTML is. As I mentioned in the mail to which you're

Re: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-07 Thread Iljitsch van Beijnum
On 7 jul 2009, at 12:25, John C Klensin wrote: The questions, or at least a subset of them, are important. But we never manage to reach consensus, partially I think because we make different assumptions about what is important, and that wastes a lot of time. If we really want to make

Re: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-07 Thread Doug Ewell
Iljitsch van Beijnum iljitsch at muada dot com wrote: If we really want to make progress here it's not going to happen by reaching rough consensus after a long discussion, but by a (very) small group of people getting together and coming up with something that improves upon the current

Re: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-07 Thread John C Klensin
--On Tuesday, July 07, 2009 12:49 +0200 Iljitsch van Beijnum iljit...@muada.com wrote: If we really want to make progress here it's not going to happen by reaching rough consensus after a long discussion, but by a (very) small group of people getting together and coming up with something

Re: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-07 Thread Iljitsch van Beijnum
On 7 jul 2009, at 22:42, John C Klensin wrote: The good thing is that the current situation leaves so much to be desired that this should actually be doable. I do not believe that we can reach agreement on even the last statement. I think this discussion shows that our starting assumptions

Re: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-07 Thread Tim Bray
On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 1:42 PM, John C Klensinjohn-i...@jck.com wrote: I do not believe that we can reach agreement on even the last statement. I am afraid that you may be correct. I am flabbergasted that consensus on the superior usability of HTML over IETF legacy plain-text (all other

RE: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-07 Thread Dave Nelson
This is clearly correct but many of us feel that correct display in a browser is of higher utility to a greater number of potential spec users. This seems to follow the currently popular all the world is a browser philosophy. I actually prefer plain-text for lots of uses, including email. I

RE: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-06 Thread Yaakov Stein
OK, here is what happens on my netbook using your method. Original 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ | Type |Length |R|T| Transport flags | Res |

Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-06 Thread james woodyatt
On Jul 5, 2009, at 05:02, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote: On Jun 29, 2009, at 16:22, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote: It is not the height of the barrier, it is the perception that people are making nit-picking objections for the sake of rubbing people's noses in the fact that they can decide where

Re: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-06 Thread Bill McQuillan
On Sun, 2009-07-05, Yaakov Stein wrote: OK, here is what happens on my netbook using your method. Original 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ | Type |Length |R|T|

Re: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-06 Thread Iljitsch van Beijnum
On 6 jul 2009, at 8:53, Yaakov Stein wrote: OK, here is what happens on my netbook using your method. What I see : 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+- +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ Hm, it's not supposed to break lines between pre and

Re: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-06 Thread Melinda Shore
Tim Bray wrote: On Sun, Jul 5, 2009 at 9:05 AM, Melinda Shoremelinda.sh...@gmail.com wrote: You're heading into new territory, here. No, I disagreed with an unqualified assertion you made using the extremely well-defined termASCII. Sure, you are. You're implying that there are characters

Re: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-06 Thread Julian Reschke
Melinda Shore wrote: ... I don't think that the second part of your assertion is correct. I'm not trying to be difficult. I introduce by example the huge number of mobile devices that handle HTML effortlessly and IETF legacy ASCII not at all. I've never run into a device that can't display

Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-06 Thread Stewart Bryant
Paul It appears that people have forgotten that, when needed for clear artwork, RFCs can be published in PDF format. This has been done in the past, and can be done again in the future. If WGs are not doing some work because of fear of not having it published as an RFC because of the

Re: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-06 Thread Iljitsch van Beijnum
On 6 jul 2009, at 12:08, Melinda Shore wrote: Plus, there appears to be a certain amount of whimsy involved with rendering HTML and displays can be inconsistent, which 1) is one of the complaints about the current format, and 2) is undesirable for the display of technical specifications. I

Re: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-06 Thread Julian Reschke
Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote: ... This is the part that would be easy to fix by adopting a very basic flavor of HTML. This would give us line wrap and the ability to use tables, but we'd lose the headers/footers. ASCII art could still be used ... Headers/footers will work just fine with a

Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-06 Thread Bob Braden
We know this, the problem is that you cannot publish a standards track document in this format. Stewart This is not quite true... at least, it never used to be true. The restriction is/was that only the .txt version is normative; a .pdf version is non-normative and intended for

Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-06 Thread Paul Hoffman
At 6:56 AM -0700 7/6/09, Bob Braden wrote: This is not quite true... at least, it never used to be true. The restriction is/was that only the .txt version is normative; a .pdf version is non-normative and intended for explanatory material. This is my understanding as well (I can't find an RFC

Re: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-06 Thread Eric Rosen
huge number of mobile devices that handle HTML effortlessly and IETF legacy ASCII not at all HTML is a good presentation format, but as an archival format it seems to leave a lot to be desired, as the included links always seem to go stale. Also, I don't think that the notions

Re: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-06 Thread Julian Reschke
Eric Rosen wrote: huge number of mobile devices that handle HTML effortlessly and IETF legacy ASCII not at all HTML is a good presentation format, but as an archival format it seems to leave a lot to be desired, as the included links always seem to go stale. ... But that's a problem

Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-06 Thread Bob Braden
Paul, Section 2.4 of 2223bis (www.rfc-editor.org/rfc-editor/instructions2authors.txt) says: The ASCII plain text version (and its .txt.pdf facsimile) is always the official specification, and it must adequately and completely define the technical content. ...

Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-06 Thread Russ Housley
Paul is correct. I-D Submission in quite intentionally less strict. I have been out of the office and away from email for the last week, and as a result, I have not fully caught up on this thread. However, there are some things that seem to need clarification.

Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-06 Thread Martin Rex
Stefan Winter wrote: Plain ASCII makes work on drafts which deal with internationalisation very hard. I have just uploaded a draft with an example second-level domain containing the German small u-Umlaut [U+00FC] as input to an algorithm. Sorry, in fact

Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-06 Thread Julian Reschke
Martin Rex wrote: Some more thoughts about this: As long as the IETF want to continue publishing standards in the one single language English, it should restrict the character sets in the texts (and the examples) to ASCII. Text? Yes. Examples? Contact info? No. non-ASCII letters are a royal

Re: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-06 Thread Douglas Otis
On Jul 3, 2009, at 3:16 PM, Doug Ewell wrote: Douglas Otis dotis at mail dash abuse dot org wrote: Reliance upon open source tools ensures the original RFCs and ID can be maintained by others, without confronting unresolvable compatibility issues. Whether a tool is open source or not

RE: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-05 Thread Yaakov Stein
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. You seemed to have missed the point. Almost all

RE: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-05 Thread Yaakov Stein
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.

Re: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-05 Thread Melinda Shore
Yaakov Stein wrote: You seemed to have missed the point. Almost all RFCs have ASCII art in them, and although perhaps not absolutely needed for correct implementation they are necessary to comprehend the document. When you improperly break lines these figures are irreversibly corrupted, and

Re: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-05 Thread Iljitsch van Beijnum
On 5 jul 2009, at 15:04, Yaakov Stein wrote: 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. You seemed

Re: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-05 Thread Tim Bray
On Sun, Jul 5, 2009 at 6:27 AM, Melinda Shoremelinda.sh...@gmail.com wrote: Right now ascii text is probably the most widely-supported display format. This statement is violently counter-intuitive and shouldn't be accepted unsupported by evidence. - ASCII is not usable for the languages of a

RE: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-05 Thread Paul Hoffman
At 4:12 PM +0300 7/5/09, Yaakov Stein wrote: If I remember correctly, draft-ash-alt-formats gave such examples. G.805 diagrams were needed for some of the PWE and MPLS work, but could not be put in the desired format. I personally started writing up a description of a packet loss concealment

Re: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-05 Thread Melinda Shore
Tim Bray wrote: On Sun, Jul 5, 2009 at 6:27 AM, Melinda Shoremelinda.sh...@gmail.com wrote: Right now ascii text is probably the most widely-supported display format. This statement is violently counter-intuitive and shouldn't be accepted unsupported by evidence. - ASCII is not usable for the

Re: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-05 Thread Doug Ewell
Tim Bray tbray at textuality dot com wrote: Right now ascii text is probably the most widely-supported display format. - ASCII is not usable for the languages of a large majority of the world's population. I suspect Melinda meant to say plain text, and wasn't intending to mix up the ASCII

Re: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-05 Thread Tim Bray
On Sun, Jul 5, 2009 at 9:05 AM, Melinda Shoremelinda.sh...@gmail.com wrote: You're heading into new territory, here. No, I disagreed with an unqualified assertion you made using the extremely well-defined termASCII. As others have pointed out, progress is being impeded by the conflation of a

Re: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-05 Thread Doug Ewell
Tim Bray tbray at textuality dot com wrote: I don't think that the second part of your assertion is correct. I'm not trying to be difficult. I introduce by example the huge number of mobile devices that handle HTML effortlessly and IETF legacy ASCII not at all. Also, the large number of

Re: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-05 Thread Tim Bray
On Sun, Jul 5, 2009 at 9:02 PM, Doug Ewelld...@ewellic.org wrote: Tim Bray tbray at textuality dot com wrote: I introduce by example the huge number of mobile devices that handle HTML effortlessly and IETF legacy ASCII not at all.  Also, the large number of standard office printers that

Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-03 Thread Stefan Winter
Hi, 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

Re: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-03 Thread Iljitsch van Beijnum
On 3 jul 2009, at 0:35, Pete Resnick wrote: A much better solution would be HTML, if it's sufficiently constrained. Or, gee, we could generalize to a very constrained XML format XML isn't a display format. As Dave put it, the current RFC format is unfriendly, unnecessary, possibly

Re: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-03 Thread Stewart Bryant
Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote: On 3 jul 2009, at 0:35, Pete Resnick wrote: A much better solution would be HTML, if it's sufficiently constrained. Or, gee, we could generalize to a very constrained XML format XML isn't a display format. As Dave put it, the current RFC format is unfriendly,

Re: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-03 Thread Iljitsch van Beijnum
On 3 jul 2009, at 13:13, Stewart Bryant wrote: That is an author centric view. It is far more important to take a reader centric view. Do we have any objective information on what format produced the clearest information transfer in the reader. Well, readers can't read what authors can't

Re: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-03 Thread Stewart Bryant
Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote: On 3 jul 2009, at 13:13, Stewart Bryant wrote: That is an author centric view. It is far more important to take a reader centric view. Do we have any objective information on what format produced the clearest information transfer in the reader. Well, readers

Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-03 Thread Martin Rex
Stefan Winter wrote: I'll have a go at it (I am not a working group, but I hope you allow me to express my opinion anyway). Plain ASCII makes work on drafts which deal with internationalisation very hard. I have just uploaded a draft with an example second-level domain containing the German

Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-03 Thread Julian Reschke
Martin Rex wrote: Stefan Winter wrote: I'll have a go at it (I am not a working group, but I hope you allow me to express my opinion anyway). Plain ASCII makes work on drafts which deal with internationalisation very hard. I have just uploaded a draft with an example second-level domain

Re: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-03 Thread Doug Ewell
As always when this discussion occurs, there are at least three different issues swirling around: 1. ASCII-only vs. UTF-8 2. Plain text vs. higher-level formatting, for text flow and readability 3. Whether it is a good idea to include high-quality pictures in RFCs There are not the same

Re: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-03 Thread John Leslie
Stewart Bryant stbry...@cisco.com wrote: That is an author centric view. It is far more important to take a reader centric view. I must dissent. Reader-centric views belong to publishing entities that generate income (whether by purchase, subscription, or advertising). There have

Re: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-03 Thread Pete Resnick
On 7/3/09 at 10:16 AM +0200, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote: On 3 jul 2009, at 0:35, Pete Resnick wrote: A much better solution would be HTML, if it's sufficiently constrained. Or, gee, we could generalize to a very constrained XML format XML isn't a display format. And how is this

Re: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-03 Thread Stewart Bryant
John Leslie wrote: Stewart Bryant stbry...@cisco.com wrote: That is an author centric view. It is far more important to take a reader centric view. I must dissent. Reader-centric views belong to publishing entities that generate income (whether by purchase, subscription, or

Re: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-03 Thread Douglas Otis
On Jul 3, 2009, at 8:07 AM, Doug Ewell wrote: As always when this discussion occurs, there are at least three different issues swirling around: 1. ASCII-only vs. UTF-8 2. Plain text vs. higher-level formatting, for text flow and readability 3. Whether it is a good idea to include

Re: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-03 Thread Stewart Bryant
Pete 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. Surely maximizing the probability of correct understanding by the reader is primary. Everything else is just a

Re: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-03 Thread Dave CROCKER
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

Re: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-03 Thread Doug Ewell
Douglas Otis dotis at mail dash abuse dot org wrote: Reliance upon open source tools ensures the original RFCs and ID can be maintained by others, without confronting unresolvable compatibility issues. Whether a tool is open source or not has nothing to do with how many people know how to

Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-02 Thread Stefan Santesson
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

Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-02 Thread Henrik Levkowetz
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

RE: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-02 Thread Yaakov Stein
...@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

RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-02 Thread Iljitsch van Beijnum
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

RE: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-02 Thread Yaakov Stein
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

Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-02 Thread Doug Ewell
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

Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-02 Thread Julian Reschke
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

Re: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-02 Thread Tim Bray
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

Re: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-02 Thread Stewart Bryant
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

Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-02 Thread Ted Hardie
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,

Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-02 Thread Marshall Eubanks
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

Re: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-02 Thread Iljitsch van Beijnum
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

Re: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-02 Thread Ole Jacobsen
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

Re: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-02 Thread Julian Reschke
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

Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-02 Thread Douglas Otis
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

Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-02 Thread Stewart Bryant
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

Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-02 Thread Marshall Eubanks
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

Re: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-02 Thread Pete Resnick
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

Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-02 Thread ned+ietf
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

RE: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-01 Thread Yaakov Stein
The TXT versions do not print on my printer and have not printed reliably on any printer I have ever owned. I discovered by accident that, on my machine, simply opening a text version in Microsoft Word gives a document which prints properly, page breaks and all. (10 point Courier I think.)

RE: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-01 Thread Yaakov Stein
Oh and please no more of the thousand years nonsense. If mankind can decipher Linear-B after three millenia on the basis of two shopping lists and an op-ed piece then there is never going to be any problem with PDF or HTML. The idea that we would lose the ability to process those formats is simply

Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-01 Thread Stefan Santesson
To respond to the original question. For what it is worth, I have written a simple and free tool in java for editing (and viewing) drafts using nroff, which I find a lot easier and convenient than XML. It's available from: http://aaa-sec.com/nroffedit/index.html Source is available upon

Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-01 Thread Theodore Tso
On Wed, Jul 01, 2009 at 09:00:48AM +0300, Yaakov Stein wrote: I would not be surprised if with my next machine I would find it impossible to print correctly using any of the standard utilities provided, and that I would be forced to write a program to do so. The machine after that will

RE: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-01 Thread Tony Hain
Hallam- Baker; IETF Discussion Mailing List Subject: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required On Wed, Jul 01, 2009 at 09:00:48AM +0300, Yaakov Stein wrote: I would not be surprised if with my next machine I would find it impossible to print correctly using any of the standard

Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-01 Thread Donald Eastlake
I just do my drafts in nroff and edit with emacs. Donald = Donald E. Eastlake 3rd d3e...@gmail.com On Wed, Jul 1, 2009 at 2:22 AM, Stefan Santessonste...@aaa-sec.com wrote: To respond to the original question. For what it is worth, I have written a simple and

Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-01 Thread Martin Rex
Theodore Tso wrote: On Wed, Jul 01, 2009 at 09:00:48AM +0300, Yaakov Stein wrote: I would not be surprised if with my next machine I would find it impossible to print correctly using any of the standard utilities provided, and that I would be forced to write a program to do so. The

Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-01 Thread Stefan Santesson
How do you translate the .nroff formatted document to a readable text document? Can emacs do that for you? /Stefan On 09-07-01 9:10 PM, Donald Eastlake d3e...@gmail.com wrote: I just do my drafts in nroff and edit with emacs. Donald = Donald E. Eastlake 3rd

Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-01 Thread Randy Presuhn
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

Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-01 Thread Melinda Shore
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

Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-01 Thread Julian Reschke
Martin Rex wrote: 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

Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-01 Thread Douglas Otis
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

Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-06-30 Thread Iljitsch van Beijnum
On 29 jun 2009, at 23:32, Andrew Sullivan wrote: On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 01:37:31PM -0700, David Morris wrote: 1000 years from now, it will certainly be easier to recover content from an ascii 'file' than an html, xml, or pdf 'file' created now. It is probably an unjustified assumption that

RE: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-06-30 Thread Dearlove, Christopher (UK)
The TXT versions do not print on my printer and have not printed reliably on any printer I have ever owned. I discovered by accident that, on my machine, simply opening a text version in Microsoft Word gives a document which prints properly, page breaks and all. (10 point Courier I think.)

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