> > undocumented, and unstable. I hope we have consensus on that. > Sorry, no such consensus. No problem. We've taken your tip and redefined consensus to exclude anyone who disagrees with us. > I don't see why the editor you use needs to be open-standard. Actually, I don't care what editor you use and I doubt that anyone else does, either. I do care quite a lot what document formats you expect me to deal with, and for reasons that other people have already explained, undocumented, unstable, proprietary formats are non-starters for archival documents such as RFCs. > More seriously, Word is the only commonly used editor with an integrated > tracking mechanism. I assume that even the purists who insist on nroff > occasionally write an ID with others. Indeed we do, and we appreciate the fact that Emacs integrates so well with RCS and CVS. What I see here is severe confusion between tools and formats, and a lack of clarity about input and output formats. I happen to write entire books with other authors and editors, and although I am often stuck using Word as an input format because that is the only editor they know, I cannot begin to tell you how badly Word stinks for the purpose, particularly if I need to do something with a document other than print it out. I have written whole books in subset troff and then mechanically translated it to other formats such as RTF for the Word crowd, because the tools I can use on ASCII files with explicit markup are so much better than the feeble set that work on Word files. Of the various additional formats people have proposed, the only one that makes sense for I-D's is RFC2629 XML. It's well specified, and it's ASCII underneath so we can be confident it'll be readable in the future even if our tools get lost. If you want to use Word to edit it, fine, go hire someone to write a Word converter for it. (Best not to say "oh, that would cost too much" unless you want to hear a whole lot of snickering.) Since XML can be kind of hard to read, PDF/A is a reasonable alternate presentation format, but I would be happier if every PDF/A I-D and RFC had to come with an XML original so we can edit it reasonably. Regards, John Levine, johnl@xxxxxxxx, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://www.johnlevine.com, Mayor "I shook hands with Senators Dole and Inouye," said Tom, disarmingly. _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf