Re: document writing/editing tools used by IETF

[Phillip Hallam-Baker <[e-mail]>]

My RFCTool takes Markdown and Word format documents and converts them to
Word, Markdown, HTML, TXT and XML2RFC.

Most of my source documents are a combination of Word and Markdown.
Generating Markdown examples much easier than generating Word.

The Word document format is an open standard at this point and pretty much
every word processor out there can generate output in it.

The reason for choosing HTML over Word is that HTML editors mostly suck.


On Thu, Feb 25, 2021 at 3:28 PM Keith Moore <[e-mail]>
wrote:

> On 2/25/21 12:39 PM, Andrew Campling wrote:
>
> > This made me smile as GitHub is itself an excellent example of a tool
> being a barrier to entry for new participants.
> +1.
> > I've been using word processors since the early '80s (WordStar back in
> the day), don't understand why anyone would opt to use a different tool to
> write a document.
>
> I would like to make it be the case that anyone could submit a document
> written with their favorite word processor, and for that document to be
> converted to whatever format we want to use.   I actually think this is
> feasible for document submission.   If nothing else, most word
> processors can generate some flavor of HTML, and that HTML could be
> stripped down to its bare essence and converted to rfc2xml.   It's
> entirely doable, probably with a relatively small amount of python
> code.   (You do need some conventions for representing metadata in HTML
> that can be input with a word processor, but I think I see how to do
> that too.)
>
> But if we insist on one particular word processor, that will create a
> huge mess.   Having multiple parties edit the same document in
> succession with different tools (even if they're supposedly all
> compatible with the same format) results in a document that some people
> won't be able to read or edit, won't display or print consistently,
> etc., and may not be repairable.     And all of those document formats
> are moving targets.
>
> > I know that this point of view will not be accepted by many current IETF
> participants but it seems particularly perverse to use a software
> development tool to write documents when there are many widely available
> options that are far better suited to the task (many of which support
> collaborative writing).
>
> Actually, I doubt there is a single option that is better and which
> supports collaborative writing.  Because forcing thousands of volunteers
> to use a common set of proprietary tools (many of which are unreliable,
> profoundly dysfunctional, expensive, and have abysmal user interfaces)
> is absolutely unacceptable.
>
> Keith
>
>
>