Re: [rfc-i] The role of txt format in ietf document development

[Carsten Bormann <[e-mail]>]

On 2020-10-28, at 16:20, Paul Kyzivat <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> it is possible, and perhaps desirable, for the ietf to move to a system totally detached from plain text.

I have been working with and on (writing, using, educating, researching) various text processing systems for about four decades now.

The one development that I couldn’t have predicted was when, shortly after 2000, structured document formats such as those based on XML or HTML were supplanted again on the authoring side by plain text formats (“humane markup”) such as asciidoc and markdown.
Of course, these are structured documents as well, but there is finally attention to being able to work with them as an authoring format.
(Those of us that were living in nroff/troff or LaTeX can sympathize, but these formats were too intricately tied up with their formatters.)

Having embraced this move to humane markup in a number of markdown- and asciidoc-based authoring formats for I-Ds and RFCs in the last decade, I don’t think we will move away from that.  The main reason is that it is really easy to collaborate on humane markup using tools like git and github, and the IETF document generation process is fundamentally collaborative, much more so than in other SDOs.

W3C is maybe an exception, and they have an amazing tool called respec that is based on HTML authoring and a ton of Javascript.  This is an interesting alternative direction, but not one that I think would work so well with the diversity of authors we have in the IETF(*).

So I think plain text (with humane markup) will be our preferred authoring side for some time to be.  A plaintext formatted rendition fits well with many ancillary processes we use during authoring and reviewing.  Even if the occasional SVG figure drops in only on the HTML/PDF side.

Grüße, Carsten

(*) respec is profoundly an ART-area tool, and I’m not even sure about the RAI part of ART.  That fits W3C, but not the IETF.

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