Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote: > On 17-jun-2006, at 0:18, Joe Touch wrote: > >> It's worth distinguishing the search for alternate normative output >> formats from the search for a standard input format. > > I think the mistake is to make the output format normative. If we make > the input format normative and publish that we're out of the woods: > obviously the input format is editable, and if it's sufficiently (but > not overly) well-defined output formats can be generated as desired. Forcing the input format means one of two things: - edit source code (argh - back to the stone age) - force a limited set of editing software I find neither useful nor productive. >>> I'm very partial to xml2rfc, > > I'm sorry to be so negative, but I hate it. The stupid thing can't even > handle my name properly so I have to live with what it does or edit the > result manually. I gave up on it when cut/paste of blocks was more likely to render the result uncompilable and impossible to repair. > XML2RFC once made me miss a draft deadline by choking on some XML I > wrote without saying why or where, leaving me with an impossible > debugging task. Formatting drafts in vi may take longer on average than > working with xml2rfc but it's more deterministic. I found the new Word template let me focus on what it was I was writing, and freed me from the arcane details of how it was encoded or processed. That, IMO, is the purpose of the input format. Anything that's less freeing is a step backwards. Joe
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