Re: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

Douglas Otis <dotis at mail dash abuse dot org> wrote:

> Reliance upon open source tools ensures the original RFCs and ID can 
> be maintained by others, without confronting unresolvable 
> compatibility issues.

Whether a tool is open source or not has nothing to do with how many 
people know how to use it.  Are you talking about maintainability of the 
documents or of the tools?

> It would also be a bad practice to rely upon unstable proprietary 
> formats having limited OS support and significant security issues.

Oh, stop.  Word 2007 can read and save Word 97 documents.  Applications 
for Windows, which has a 90% to 93% desktop market share, can hardly be 
said to suffer from "limited OS support."  And turning off macros is 
becoming more and more common among Word users; it's even a separate 
non-default document format under Word 2007.

I know The Penguin doesn't like the fact that Word is closed-source, 
but -- like the multiple discussions being lumped under "RFC archival 
format" -- we need to separate that issue from questions of whether the 
app is any good.  And if we're talking about an author using Word (or 
TextPad or roff or whatever) to pre-process a file into an RFC 
Editor-friendly format, which can then be converted to traditional RFC 
text or HTML or PDF or something, then isn't the horror of using Word 
limited to that author?

--
Doug Ewell  *  Thornton, Colorado, USA  *  RFC 4645  *  UTN #14
http://www.ewellic.org
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