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

Byung-Hee HWANG <bh at izb dot knu dot ac dot kr> wrote:

> Already, above, Douglas pointed out for your comments correctly. RFC 
> format is different from a market share format by the purpose. Do you 
> have been think about the word "compatibility" and "standard"? Here is 
> IETF, not a market.. ;;

This thread has been headed down the wrong path from the outset, as soon 
as Tony Hain wrote on July 1:

> An alternative would be for some xml expert to fix xml2rfc to parse 
> through the xml output of Word. If that happened, then the 
> configuration options described in RFC 3285 would allow for wysiwyg 
> editing, and I would update 3285 to reflect the xml output process. I 
> realize that is a vendor specific option, but it happens to be a 
> widely available one.

and Douglas replied by going off on Word:

> Word's closed code is continuously changing.   Availability of this 
> closed application depends upon OS compatibility and version 
> regressions.   Both are moving targets.  In addition, Word formats 
> permit inclusion of potentially destructive scripts within highly 
> flexible and obfuscating structures.

Nobody in this thread has suggested publishing RFCs or distributing I-Ds 
in any native Microsoft Word format.  The only thing Tony suggested was 
to "fix xml2rfc" to convert XML documents generated by Word into the 
standard format for RFCs and I-Ds, just as xml2rfc already converts XML 
documents written in the RFC 2629(bis) format into the standard format 
for RFCs and I-Ds.  I modified that, along the course of the thread, to 
suggest that a separate "word2rfc" tool might be a more sensible option.

To the extent the .doc format is "highly flexible" -- which isn't really 
true anyway; it's been rather stable since 1997, and the new XML-based 
format is called .docx -- I can see that as an obstacle for someone 
writing such a conversion tool.  But I challenge anyone to find the 
slightest suggestion in this thread that we should publish IETF 
documents directly in Word format.  Let's at least argue the same point, 
folks.

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