On Jul 3, 2009, at 3:16 PM, Doug Ewell wrote:
Douglas Otis <dotis at mail dash abuse dot org> wrote:
Reliance upon open source tools ensures the original RFCs and ID
can be maintained by others, without confronting unresolvable
compatibility issues.
Whether a tool is open source or not has nothing to do with how many
people know how to use it. Are you talking about maintainability of
the documents or of the tools?
The concern is about the application accepting document instructions
and text and then generating document output. When this application
is proprietary, it is prone to change where remedies might become
expensive or impossible. The evolution in hardware tends to force the
use of different operating systems which may no longer support older
applications.
IIRC, I did work back in the early 90's that contained Russian written
using Word 5. Conversion proved difficult since proprietary fonts
were needed. Document recovery then required a fair amount of work to
rediscover the structure and character mapping. Trying to get any
version of Word to generate plain text outputs consistently always
seemed to be a PITA, that varied from version to version, and never
seemed worth the effort.
It would also be a bad practice to rely upon unstable proprietary
formats having limited OS support and significant security issues.
Oh, stop. Word 2007 can read and save Word 97 documents.
Instead of 10 years, go back another 5 years. When people are
required to input Word Document "instructions" into their Word
application, they might become exposed to system security issues as
well. The variability of the Word data structures makes identifying
security threats fairly difficult, where many "missing" features seem
to be an intended imposition as a means to necessitate use of the
vendor's macro language. Inherent security issues alone should
disqualify use of proprietary applications.
Applications for Windows, which has a 90% to 93% desktop market
share, can hardly be said to suffer from "limited OS support."
When support is almost exclusively Windows, this still represents
limited support. It would be sending the wrong message to mandate
the use of proprietary operating systems or applications in order to
participate in IETF efforts. After all, lax security often found
within proprietary operating systems and applications threatens the
Internet.
And turning off macros is becoming more and more common among Word
users; it's even a separate non-default document format under Word
2007.
The many automation features fulfilled by TCL and xml2rfc will likely
be attempted with the native word processor scripts. The latest
Word, if you can afford it, is almost ISO/IEC 29500:2008 Office Open
XML compliant. Perhaps Word will be compliant in its 2010 version. :^(
I know The Penguin doesn't like the fact that Word is closed-source,
but -- like the multiple discussions being lumped under "RFC
archival format" -- we need to separate that issue from questions of
whether the app is any good. And if we're talking about an author
using Word (or TextPad or roff or whatever) to pre-process a file
into an RFC Editor-friendly format, which can then be converted to
traditional RFC text or HTML or PDF or something, then isn't the
horror of using Word limited to that author?
Open source includes more than just Linux, and the exposure of
requiring proprietary applications or operating systems would affect
nearly all IETF participants that maintain existing documents or
generating new ones.
-Doug
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