On 5/15/19 6:26 PM, Ted Lemon wrote:
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.
Assuming by "doing text markup" you mean "transmitting incremental
changes to a document over text email bodies", I see your point even
though I don't entirely agree. I think it works ok for small changes
even though a bit cumbersome for larger ones. Second, one advantage of
doing everything over email is that there's a record of everything in
one place, in a standard format, with all of the various contributions'
authors, dates, and text recorded.
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.
I see your point here also, but it's hard to deny that MUAs keep getting
worse. Even if "just use the one we have" works today (which is
debatable), there's little reason to believe it will continue to work in
the future.
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.
Another advantage of doing everything over email is that it doesn't lend
itself to spying on participants nearly as much as pretty much every web
application that is operated by a commercial endeavor.
So yeah, IETF producing better tooling might be something we should
consider. We can't trust any of the major commercial players in this
space.
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.
So basically require most contributors to use more tools that they don't
regularly use (xml2rfc is bad enough already), just so they can avoid
using email? Not sure that's a step forward.
But there may still be some room to write a portable app that works as a
plugin for most MUAs. Not sure what to do about people using web
clients or mobile platforms, though.
Keith
