At 3:58 AM -0500 11/26/05, John C Klensin wrote:
--On Friday, November 25, 2005 10:45 AM -0800 Paul Hoffman
<paul.hoffman@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
At 9:13 PM -0800 11/24/05, Christian Huitema wrote:
An interesting part of the current text format is that it is
defined in a very simple way: so many lines, so many columns,
that's about it.
Just to clarify: there are no number of lines or number of
columns requirements for submitting Internet Drafts. It is
acceptable to turn in unpaginated plain text, and the number
of columns is only required for ASCII art if you want your
Internet Draft to be eventually published as an RFC.
Unfortunately, this is no longer true, or wasn't true a year or so
ago. Someone (there was no public announcement) decided that I-D
announcements needed to contain a page count. The secretariat
responded by (quite properly) complaining to individual authors that
unpaginated documents made their work much harder and that long
lines broke their tools. And, as others have pointed out, we are
now operating in a world in which, if one doesn't have the
boilerplate, and _exactly_ the right boilerplate, the submissions
get bounced.
How this happened, after what consideration of tradeoffs, and on
what authority from the community is another thread, but it
certainly has happened.
Wow. I didn't know that because I switched over to XML around that
time; before then, I was using plain text without pagination.
If it is still true, it is also sad. Forcing people to use
non-intuitive formatting tools just so someone can have a page count
for Internet Drafts is not conducive to getting good work from
volunteer Internet Draft authors.
--Paul Hoffman, Director
--VPN Consortium
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