Re: radical suggestion

Keith Moore <moore@cs.utk.edu> Sun, 15 September 2002 21:22 UTC

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From: Keith Moore <moore@cs.utk.edu>
To: Philip Hazel <ph10@cus.cam.ac.uk>
cc: Keith Moore <moore@cs.utk.edu>, Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu>, ietf-822@imc.org
Subject: Re: radical suggestion
In-reply-to: (Your message of "Sun, 15 Sep 2002 19:54:17 BST.") <Pine.SOL.4.44.0209151948570.22091-100000@draco.cus.cam.ac.uk>
Date: Sun, 15 Sep 2002 17:22:40 -0400
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> > note that the amendments can still be useful in their own right, for
> > people who are very familiar with the current spec - those people want
> > to know the diffs from the previous version.
> 
> Surely the technology can deal with that? Way back in the 1970s IBM
> used to use "change bars" on the right hand side to mark changed text in
> its printed reference manuals. I still do this in the Exim manual, but I
> haven't seen it commonly elsewhere. It's easy for text processors to do,
> and it's visually very easy to spot when flicking through a text, either
> on paper or on a screen. And it's easy to remove afterwards.

change bars are useful, but they only show you the new text - not
the text it replaces.  

my point was that I think we'd be more productive if we discussed
and reviewed specific text changes instead of discussing and
reviewing the entire document with some less clear set of changes.