Re: [apps-discuss] [Editorial Errata Reported] RFC7386 (4132)

[John C Klensin <[e-mail]>]

(RFC Errata system address removed -- this is not an errata
issue)

--On Friday, October 24, 2014 08:27 +0200 Julian Reschke
<[e-mail]> wrote:

> On 2014-10-16 01:16, Carsten Bormann wrote:
>> On 16 Oct 2014, at 01:06, Manger, James
>> <[e-mail]> wrote:
>...
>> Yep, the copy of rfc7386.xml I have has been tabified, while
>> draft-ietf-appsawg-json-merge-patch-07.xml is clean.
>> 
>> NEVER, EVER, tabify documents.
>> THROW OUT ALL TOOLS THAT DO THIS.
>> (Sorry for shouting, but this TAB nonsense has cost too much
>> time in my life already.) ...
> 
> For the record, I see at least two RFCs in AUTH48 with HTAB
> characters: RFC 7390 and 7391 (reminder: there's an Atom feed
> with validation results:
> <http://greenbytes.de/tech/tc/xml2rfc/rfcdiags.atom>).

Folks, regardless of what the IESG and posting tools choose to
allow in I-Ds, it would be extremely simple to direct the RFC
Production Center to remove all tabs from documents as part of
their processing and then verify that the results look
reasonable before documents are handed back to authors, etc., at
AUTH48.  It would also be easy for them to add a note about
checking formatting on the possibly de-tabbed documents to their
AUTH48 instructions to authors and, with only a tad more work,
to include that instruction only if there were tabs in the I-D
that came to them for processing.

While it would impose more burden on authors, it would be easier
yet (and at least equally effective) for the RFC Editor Function
to require that documents not contain tabs when they were
submitted for publication, to perform a very simple check, and
to bounce the documents back to the submitting Stream if one or
more tabs were present.

If you believe any of those things are important, take it up
with the RSE (copied on at least the last few of these notes)
and/or on the rfc-interest list.   If you don't get the results
you like, take it up with the IAB.

It would only affect some I-Ds, but a suggestion that XML2RFC
might generate warnings if tabs appeared, either at all or in
artwork or equivalent might help too.  Or one could suggest that
the posting tools at least warn if tabs are present in their
initial nits check.  For those suggestions, talk with the tools
team and/or the IESG.

But, at least IMO, continuing to kick this particular horse, of
already dubious viability, on the apps-discuss list is a waste
of time and distracts from topics that are actually in the Apps
Area critical path.

    john