Keith (any anyone else looking for shiny new draft authoring tools),
I recommend that you give Carsten Bormann's Kramdown a try. It's really easy to pick up and use. You can install a converter locally, or just use the one at https://xml2rfc.tools.ietf.org/experimental.html . From Kramdown source, you can directly generate any output format, or generate XML (look for the "kramdown" button in the first dialog box, and also the third dialog box at https://xml2rfc.tools.ietf.org/experimental.html). There's documentation at https://github.com/cabo/kramdown-rfc2629, and a syntax guide at https://kramdown.gettalong.org/syntax.html . I find that it really lets me concentrate more on the content and less on the formatting.
Cheers,
Andy
On Sat, Oct 31, 2020 at 7:19 AM Keith Moore <moore@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
First, I am sorry if I gave the impression that I thought any of "you
should feel bad" about any preferences you might have for either
input/authoring/revision or output formats for RFCs. I'm pretty sure
that was not my intention.
(I do appreciate Warren's mention of that, though. I was raised and
schooled in a world full of "you should feel bad", and it's a poor habit
of both speaking and thinking. And I struggle to think of occasions in
which "you should feel bad" have actually helped people be wiser or
better informed.)
I have used all of the RFC output formats and continue to find all of
them useful. If paginated plain text were added to the existing
formats, I'm not sure that I would use that format very often, but its
existence wouldn't bother me either. Even though I dislike the XML as
an input/authoring/revision format, I see its value as a common format
from which multiple output formats can be derived. (And I do not
believe that "you should feel bad" if you either happen to like the XML
or prefer paginated text as an output format.)
The frustration which I was trying to express is something more like
this: Every time I submit a new I-D, I dread the process of fighting
with the format and the tools, generally under deadline pressure of some
kind. Making the tools happy has often required more work than
writing the text itself. And occasionally I've been unable to get the
tools to produce the output in a form that I thought would be most
readable.
The problems I've seen aren't entirely with the XML2RFC language and the
document processing tools, but also with the many requirements (for
boilerplate etc) that we're expected to fulfill just in order to submit
what used to be an informal proposal. Or at least it appears that way
when I use the I-D submission tool. I remember when I could write an
acceptable I-D using nothing more than emacs, and about the only
requirement was knowing what email address to send it to.
I got into the habit of using the xml2rfc language long ago when it
seemed like the best way to make sure that the I-D would pass all of the
various requirements for submitting one. (That was right after I had
an I-D rejected, and missed a submission deadline, because I fixed a
grammatical error in some of the prescribed boilerplate text.)
But I just realized from filling out Jay's survey that there are now a
lot of I-D authoring tools that I wasn't aware of, and that I didn't
find the last time I looked for such tools sometime within the past
year. (thanks Jay!) So I'm glad to see that more such tools exist,
and I hope to find time to evaluate some of them before once again
facing another deadline to write a new I-D.
Keith
