Re: Things that used to be clear (was Re: Evolving Documents (nee "Living Documents") side meeting at IETF105.)

[Randy Bush <[e-mail]>]

> Indeed. And even a large number of habituated authors have gravitated
> towards markdown, despite the rather klunky workflow of MD -> XML -> TXT.

i do latex, md, xml2rfc, and even text.  tool use is what differentiates
us from revived 40,000 year old nematodes.  i would be happier with the
md -> xml path if it did the boilerplate.  and there are lot of features
in xml2rfc to which i am attached, e.g. intra-doc xrefs.

when we submit a paper to some conference/journal, there is a latex
template, serious formatting rules, ...  we all have our rituals and
flavors of ice cream.

i, for one, am happy if good work gets done well elsewhere.  i care that
good work gets done.  and, to be tactless, a fair bit of what we produce
may not fit well in that set.  and the problem does not lie with he
tooling or document format.

i actually try to help (when asked) folk from other cultures get work
done in the ietf.  i think the barriers we place to entry are not so
much xml, which pretty much anyone who has a *technical* contribution
can deal with in short.  it is arrogance, arcane rituals, artificial
arguments, and alliteration.

randy