Re: Why the normative form of IETF Standards is ASCII

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On 22.03.2010 22:28, Martin Rex wrote:
...
With xml2rfc 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 are all seperate, manual and painful
steps that require all sorts of unspecified other software and require
you to search around for information and read lots of stuff in order to
get it working.  The specific tools, their usage and the options to
automate some steps from the above list varies significantly between OS.
...

Hi Martin,

it's clear that you're very happy with nroffedit. I have no problem with that.

But you paint a picture of xml2rfc that isn't totally accurate.

There are editors with spell checking.

There are editors with direct preview.

Also, you need two things, exactly as for Nroffedit (xml2rfc.tcl + a TCL impl, instead of nroffedit + Java).

There is an alternate impl, rfc2629.xslt, which requires exactly one file, and a browser.

...
My first encounter with TeX was in 1990 on an Amiga, and it came _with_
an editor where you could run your document through the TeX processor and
get it display (DVI graphics output on screen) with a single keypress.
Not WYSIWYG, but still quite usable.  And comparing the quality of
the printed output, none of the existing WYSIWYG solutions came even close.
> ...

I liked Tex, too. Although I ran it on that other 68K machine.

In absence of an easy-to-use, single tool (preferably platform-independent)
to take care of most of the document editing, INCLUDING visualizing
the output, I see no value in considering an XML-based authoring
format for I-Ds and RFCs.

Again: use a text editor plus a web browser.

...
Even reflowing the existing paginated ASCII output should be fairly
simple.  What is missing in that output is the information about the
necessary amount of vertical whitespace between pages when removing
page breaks&header&footer lines.
...

What's also missing is the information whether text is reflowable or not (think ASCII artwork, program listing, tables...).

Best regards, Julian
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