On May 15, 2019, at 6:15 PM, Keith Moore <moore@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On 5/15/19 6:09 PM, Nico Williams wrote: > >> p.s. The failure so far to find a good way of annotating text in HTML >> actually illustrates a deep underlying flaw in the SGML/XML/HTML model of >> text - annotated text is not hierarchically structured (even if the subject >> text is, which is by no means certain) and Procrustean attempts to annotated >> text into a tree-structured model are somewhere between needlessly complex >> or doomed to failure. >> Yes, no HTML for IETF email work. > > The practical consequence of which might "everybody who wants to participate in IETF should use a different (approved) MUA for IETF work". Slight nit here: doing text markup by email is just a really bad idea and we shouldn’t. We really ought to stop arguing about MUAs and just use the one we have, because we have no control over the MUAs people use, and we can’t agree on what the right model is anyway. However, we could have better tooling for doing document markup. E.g., Google Docs has a suggesting mode, where I can go in and edit a document, and you see my edits as suggestions that can be either accepted or deleted. Inventing a new tool for doing this is probably too much work for the IETF to be doing, but this is a much better way to do document markup. The question is, how to tie it to the mailing list discussion in a way that is useful and understandable? A bog stupid option is to just use diff(1): edit the XML, and send us a diff. Would be nice if the diff could be annotated, and I think it can. Why don’t we do this? We’d have to make sure the MUA didn’t mangle the diff, but I think that’s a tractable problem.
