Andrew Sullivan wrote: > > On Sat, Mar 20, 2010 at 02:55:56PM -0800, Bob Braden wrote: > > > Drafts. That always seemed counter-productive to me. I am not sure I > > would characterize the problem as "serious", but it does seem t o warp > > common sense for the sake of bureaucratic uniformity.) > > I got some mail off-list about calling the problem "serious", too, so > I thought I should justify myself. > > I had, in the past year, two different DNSEXT participants send me > frustrated email because of the idnits checks. The people in question > were both long-time contributors to the IETF with perhaps > ideosyncratic toolchains. Neither of them was using xml2rfc, and > neither of them had well-maintained *roff templates that just did the > right thing. My co-chair spent some time one day fiddling with the > draft of one of these people in order to make it pass the submission > checks for a -00 draft, mostly because the author was about to give up > in frustration. You SHOULD have tried NRoffEdit. It would likely have solved all your problems in a matter of minutes. If an I-D author has issues with idnits complaining about formatting, then the toolchain of that author is likely responsible for this shortcoming. Just a few weeks ago, I used NroffEdit in order to make a suggestion for a document update in a fashion that makes it easy for others to make an assessment. I downloaded the WG document ASCII I-D (14-pages) from http://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-ietf... loaded it into NRoffEdit, selected "Edit->Convert Text to NRoff", spent about 30 minutes fixing the Table Of Contents, I-D header and some minor formatting defects from the conversion along with several existing spelling errors reported by NRoffEdit and formatting issues like new sections starting very close to the bottom of pages. ... the original author is likely an xml2rfc user without a spell checker in his tool-chain. Then I edited my changes into the document, uploaded the resulting ASCII TXT output to our internet-accessible FTP server and send an URL to the WG mailing list with a prefilled http://tools.ietf.org/rfcdiff?url1=http://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-ietf-... &url2=ftp://<my-server>/...<draft-with-my-suggestions> IMHO, being able to do this without chasing around for an authoring version of someone else's draft is neat. For various reasons, asking the original I-D editor for an authoring format version of his I-D was not an option -- and an XML-based authoring format would have been entirely useless to me anyway. And this was the first time that I tried this feature of NRoffEdit! The availability of decent tools to make your I-D authoring task simple is important, and some of the existing solutions appear to be more difficult to install, more difficult to use than others. Personally, I know very little about XML. I don't use it my self, the code that I'm writing and maintaining neither uses nor creates XML. All of my Editors are plain text editors and I don't know or care how any of my Browsers (MSIE6 or FF3.5) could be made to display XML. Being able to see right away in the right output pane of NRoffEdit how the stuff that I type comes out formatted while typing is nice. I'm writing with 10 fingers and usually have ~50 app windows open at the same time. I _really_ prefer to get things done _without_ switching between apps constantly when I'm working on something, because that will considerably slow down my work. (and the editing process I use must be entirely offline capable for policy reasons that are otherwise not relevant to this discussion). -Martin _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf