--On Thursday, 25 May, 2006 07:18 -0500 "Stephen Hayes (TX/EUS)" <stephen.hayes@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > See inline. > > Stephen Hayes > >> -----Original Message----- >> From: Joel M. Halpern [mailto:joel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] >> Sent: Wednesday, May 24, 2006 3:17 PM >> To: ietf@xxxxxxxx >> Subject: Re: LC on draft-mankin-pub-req-08.txt >... > Although the wording could be tuned to be more permissive, > it's not possible to satisfy everybody with the POSTEDIT > requirements. People just tend to end up at slightly > different places along the "how much the technical publisher > should do" curve. People can point to examples with badly > written documents that needed considerable clean-up or > examples where changes were done that added little overall > benefit to a document. > > The natural tendency of a technical publisher will be to > improve documents, since to a large degree they view > themselves as responsible for the output quality. The current > highly restrictive wording was selected to counterbalance that > tendency. The current wording also reflects that I heard more > complaints about too much editing than not enough editing. Stephen, I routinely complain about too much editing -- if not on every document I submit for RFC publication, at least most of them. I believe that, in the last couple of years there has been a trend toward more editing that I consider gratuitous, e.g., changing one correct and consistent style to another one. So I may well be the source of some of the complaints you heard. On the other hand, I'm appalled by the editorial and presentation quality of some of the documents that I've seen go to the RFC Editor, even after Last Call and IESG signoff. In my opinion, absent something that the document skirts, the "current highly restrictive reading" goes much too far. Yes, I understand the desire to counterbalance both natural tendencies and some history of over-editing. But, to the extent to which this document is expected, post-last-call, to form part of the basis for solicitation of people who are interested in doing the job and selection from among those people, and then of a contract with the selected party, I believe it goes _much_ too far: that degree of restrictiveness is simply not what we want or need, IMO. The exception case mentioned above would involve a shift to doing substantially all editing prior to IETF Last Call and doing it again if textual changes are made after Last Call, so that the document that is approved is the document that is published. That is more or less the practice in a number of other standards bodies. For reasons of both cost and process, it has never been embraced here and I don't take anything in TechSpec as either forcing that model or as otherwise assuring that documents that come into the process are of a quality that would justify very restrictive text about post-editing. regards, john _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf