Re: Image attachments to ASCII RFCs (was: Re: Last Call: 'Proposed Experiment: Normative Format in Addition to ASCII Text' to Experimental RFC (draft-ash-alt-formats))

--On Tuesday, 20 June, 2006 12:00 +0200 Iljitsch van Beijnum
<iljitsch@muada.com> wrote:

> On 20-jun-2006, at 1:07, Ned Freed wrote:
>...
>> I've tried using change bars and other fancier
>> tools,   but I have
>> concluded they're more trouble than they're worth.
> 
> Then you haven't been doing it right... If you use Word, for
> instance  (but Open Office has the same functionality) you can
> set up "track  changes" and "highlight changes when editing"
> or words to the same  effect, and then you'll see text that's
> added in a different color  depending on who added it, and you
> can reject or accept changes made  by others. You can also
> easily skip to the next edit. I can't imagine  two or more
> people working on the same document without this
> functionality.

Hmm.   With Word, for instance, virtually every correction to
the text results in a huge clutter of change-tracking notes
about format changes and similar drivel.  For many documents, it
makes the S/N ratio just miserable.   If there were a "track
substantive textual changes only" option, an "ignore format
changes" one, or some sort of "accept all format, font, and
style changes" command, I'd probably agree with you about
utility.  But, given the reality of those systems today, I tend
to agree with Ned, even though I like a feature of those system
that you didn't mention (the ability to insert comments whose
appearance in the output can easily turned on and off.  <cref>
and some processing options comes close, but isn't quite the
same).

>> My immediate thought in response to all this is "what a
>> colossal   waste of
>> time". I want to focus on document content, not stylistic
>> frills   and irrelevant
>> minutiae. That's what the RFC Editors gets the big bucks to
>> do... I   therefore
>> want a tool that lets me engage in semantic markup with as
>> little   attention
>> paid to layout issues as possible.
> 
> And that's exactly what the style mechanism is for: you can
> indicate  headings of different levels (= generate numbering
> and table of  contents automatically), have different kinds of
> lists (bulleted,  numbered) and so on.

If it worked, that would be how it would work.  My own
experience is that it is very hard to get it to work well.  To
take a handy example, try to generate a cross reference to a
heading that hasn't been generated with a built-in style in Word
(2000/ XP/ 2003). 

>...
>>> That is not my experience. Figures are very hard to get
>>> right, they very often require edits.
> 
>> It depends on what sort of edits you're talking about. Both
>> figures and equations move things away from pure semantic
>> markup and towards presentation specifics. It's unavoidable,
>> and once you enter the   presentation
>> realm the list of possible tweaks to make things just a
>> little bit better often seems endless.
> 
> I'm talking about stuff like "the text in this box should be A
> but  it's B" and "there shouldn't be a line between those two
> boxes".

But those are precisely the things that, in our environment, one
wants the author to get right and the RFC Editor to not mess
with.

    john

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