Folks, not to be a stick-in-the-mud, but one of the things that
has made the RFC Editor process attractive for authors is that
it is possible to design and use the right format for a
particular presentation. Sometimes that means "interesting"
page layouts and indentations. Sometimes it means
cross-references within a document to, e.g., numbered paragraphs
or list elements within a section (and those are different, at
least in the ways that the RFC Editor has been willing to format
them in the past). Sometimes it means reference forms that are
consistent with library or scholarly standards for the materials
being referenced, rather than forms that are optimized for
RFC-style references.
"Attractive for authors" _is_ important: while it is all very
well to say that the goal is the end user (which the authors
would typically agree with), if we make things unpleasant or
uncomfortable enough for the authors --who are, by and large,
volunteers-- we will lose some of them. That isn't healthy for
the IETF either.
It is possible to do any of the things I've mentioned above in
the xml2rfc context. However, sometimes it requires external
formatting followed by the use of <artwork> elements, which can
defeat the whole purpose of content-oriented markup. Other
times it requires tricking the processor into doing the right
thing by use of <annotation> elements or clever and undocumented
uses of <seriesInfo> and/or <format> elements.
These things are not often necessary. But they are, I would
suggest, necessary as often (or more so) than fancy graphics are.
Of the I-Ds and RFCs I have out there, some have been developed
and edited by working directly on the ASCII text. At least two
or three were developed in Word and then (painfully) converted.
One was initially developed, long ago, in SGML (!) markup but
then forced into ASCII text and continued that way. For the
last year or three, I've been using XML2RFC almost exclusively,
but I have had to make a few compromises that the RFC Editor
ultimately had to straighten out in nroff or that made the
relevant documents much harder to read and understand (as one
example, find the document-within-a-document examples of ISDs in
draft-klensin-newtrk-sample-isd-00.txt).
In addition, for I-Ds at least, making the XML generally
available raises some of the "IPR rights reserved for the author
except insofar as the IETF needs them for standards-related
work" issues raised on the IPR list -- where copyrights are
concerned, presentation formats are important. (Issues about
whether those rights are important and what they are belong on
another list.)
So, while I'm generally in favor of the "submit XML" and "keep
XML" trends and discussions, I think we need to be quite careful
that XML2RFC and its format conventions and limitations don't
become a Procrustean bed into which authors and documents either
need to fit or to find somewhere to do work besides the IETF.
john
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