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Re: Too many tools, was Things that used to be clear

"John R Levine" <johnl@taugh.com> Sat, 13 July 2019 15:19 UTC

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Date: Sat, 13 Jul 2019 11:19:26 -0400
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From: John R Levine <johnl@taugh.com>
To: Nico Williams <nico@cryptonector.com>
Cc: IETF general list <ietf@ietf.org>
Subject: Re: Too many tools, was Things that used to be clear
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On Sat, 13 Jul 2019, Nico Williams wrote:
> Before XML we had roff, so we weren't in too terrible a place, but it
> wasn't very good either.  Roff's is not a trivial learning curve either,
> and it sure doesn't look pretty, and very few people know roff.  Not
> everyone will agree, but I find xml2rfc to be a step up from roff[*].

I love troff/nroff and use it for all sorts of stuff, but it is too low 
level.  To do the kind of semantic tagging that is routine in xml, you 
have to use complex macros in an extremely disciplined way, and not many 
people can do that.  We sure didn't.

Regards,
John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Taughannock Networks, Trumansburg NY
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly

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