Lets unpack this argument: In the serious publishing world there are editors who review prose and nit pick. Therefore all nit picking is evidence of serious publishing and all criticism comes from 'unpublishable wankers'. As a matter of record I am a published author, my editors at Addison Wesley did have a somewhat weird review format but the final book is professionally typeset by a designer who had a clue about typography. On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 4:15 PM, james woodyatt<jhw@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Jun 29, 2009, at 16:22, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote: >> >> It is not the height of the barrier, it is the perception that people are >> making nit-picking objections for the sake of rubbing people's noses in the >> fact that they can decide where to put the bar. > > In the more traditional publishing milieus of which I'm aware, that sort of > perception is the shibboleth that separates the serious writers from the > unpublishable wankers. Prospective authors who express a sense of > entitlement to the submission of their manuscripts in formats that don't > meet the requirements of the editors who review them are usually encouraged > to start their own publishing outfits and see if they can do it all better > by themselves. > > Occasionally, this encouragement is even delivered without the use of coarse > language. > > We participants are our own acquisitions editors here, of course, so the > height of the barrier is what we should be thinking about. It makes sense > to me that we should be automating the mechanical screening of manuscripts > coming into the slushpile so that they meet the machine-scriptable subset of > the requirements of the RFC Editor as closely as possible. > > Are there any nitpicks the draft submission service enforces that aren't > really RFC Editor requirements? What are they? Let's fix those. What I > don't want to see is a lot of drafts start piling up without even coming > close to meeting the *mechanical* requirements of the RFC Editor, much less > the more difficult syntax requirements of the working natural language we've > chosen. It won't help anyone if we allow authors to defer the process of > cleaning up the formatting and boilerplate of a draft until late enough in > the review cycle that major reformatting deltas look to the differencing > tools like all-new content. > >> If this was about really about quality or readability I would be a lot >> more sympathetic. But when a draft is rejected because xml2rfc produces a >> txt file that is rejected because some nit-picker does not quite like the >> exact TXT format then the whole process is bogus. > > For my part, I haven't any serious complaints about the status quo (plenty > of unserious ones, but no serious ones). The process works well enough for > me-- modulo the limitations imposed by our choice of archival format, and my > general complaints about the open usability issues of XML2RFC on which I > mostly agree with EKR, and on which I'm no more prepared to do anything > about than either he or Iljitsch seems to be. > > So long as we are not discussing any proposals to *change* the set of > approved archival formats, I'll continue to be happy-- nay, very impressed, > actually-- with how well XML2RFC meets our needs, despite the its obvious > warts. > > If we decide to open another discussion about new archival formats, then > I'll be interested to follow along, but archival formats aren't on the table > here-- at least, I hope not. > > ----- > Shorter james: I'm far from convinced that changing the draft submission > server to be more lenient is the best way to address the deficiencies in the > software we're using, and I also think that opening a new discussion about > archival formats will mean unleashing a yet another force-ten maelstrom of > controversy that I'd prefer to observe from a very, very safe distance, i.e. > one measured in parsecs. > > > -- > james woodyatt <jhw@xxxxxxxxx> > member of technical staff, communications engineering > > _______________________________________________ > Ietf mailing list > Ietf@xxxxxxxx > https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf > -- -- New Website: http://hallambaker.com/ View Quantum of Stupid podcasts, Tuesday and Thursday each week, http://quantumofstupid.com/ _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf