--On Thursday, February 24, 2011 09:42 -0500 Andrew Sullivan <ajs@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Wed, Feb 23, 2011 at 01:59:23PM -0500, Dave CROCKER wrote: >> >> I was impressed with just how steady that increase appears to >> be over a reasonably extended period of time, as well as >> its seeming to be around 70%, not 50%, now. >> >> Pretty serious 'market' domination... Dave, Sure. But, having started this thread, let me point out that I don't think anyone has made a serious claim that xml2rfc is unimportant to the community, that it should not work well, or even that putting resources into making it more stable, more maintainable, or better behaved is a bad idea. Those figures are interesting but they would be relevant only if one of those "don't do this at all" arguments were being made. They haven't been. I raised two issues and two issues only: (i) That the "tell the community work is going to be started by issuing an RFP" model was suboptimal and maybe inappropriate. I think the discussions and conclusions of the last two weeks indicate that the community agrees with that position and that the IAOC has recognized that agreement. (ii) That perhaps the priorities about extensions in the draft RFP were inappropriate. I want to stress "perhaps" because, while I have a view on that subject, I think the correct priorities can emerge only from community discussion (which takes us back to (i) above). Interestingly, while the numbers you and others cite can be used to argue that improving RFC Editor Production Center Staff efficiency in dealing with documents arriving in xml2rfc format, they can equally well be used to argue that, if the community is producing that much text in that format, it is at least equally (if not more) important to improve the efficiency and capabilities of the tool (and DTD/Schema) for those who are originating/writing the documents. > I submit that this is a consequence of the submission process. > The idnits tool is now an effective gatekeeper against people > who are preparing documents with something other than xml2rfc > and, maybe, the *roff gui that's available. As a WG chair of > a WG with a lot of participants who have older toolchains, I > field regular complaints about how difficult it is to get > things by idnits. My stock advice is to use xml2rfc, which is > always being updated exactly so that it conforms to the latest > physical layout rules. > > I personally think this is sort of a shame, because it reminds > me of other (near) monocultures based on tools that are > considerably worse than the state of the art (Word is my > favourite example). I agree, especially with regard to having the tools over-constrain early drafts and sometimes thereby making it harder to expose ideas and get work done. I think the community should be pushing back, very hard, on submission tools that enforce rules that have never been formally announced by the IESG and/or approved by the community. But I think it is (or should be) a separate issue from whether and how we improve the behavior or robustness of xml2rfc. john _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf