Re: [Rfced-future] Welcome to the RFC Editor Future Development Program

[Carsten Bormann <[e-mail]>]

On 2020-04-03, at 06:46, Julian Reschke <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> On 03.04.2020 05:07, John R. Levine wrote:
>>> During the AUTH48 period, whoever is reviewing the document needs to
>>> check ALL of the formats, especially around examples and figures and
>>> any non-ascii text.
>> 
>> Currently the RPC people are proofreading all of the output formats,
>> which takes a lot of work.  I hope authors are also, but that's up to them.
>> ...
> 
> That sounds like a bug in the process to me. And it won't scale if we
> add ePub.
> 
> There should be *one* format that is to be proofread, HTML. If the other
> output formats have an issue, that's a tooling problem that needs to be
> solved, and the other formats can be regenerated.

This doesn’t work too well in an environment where the tooling is fluid, and in fact the format that the tooling works from and its interpretation is fluid as well.

When the tooling has a bug (read: it uses the interpretation of 2020-04-02), and the XML is adapted to work around this bug, and the tooling is then fixed (read: it now uses the interpretation of 2020-04-03), the new output may be erroneous.

Putting the “to be interpreted with the bugs of 2020-04-02” into the XML makes this workable, but it might be preferable to give up the idea that the XML is immutable and allow up-conversion into the format of 2020-04-03.

We probably should have recognized that we would be working with a beta v3 for a while.  We could still recognize that there will be a v4, and a v5, ...

I’m not saying that I have a solution to this problem.  Proofreading the HTML is probably the right thing for an author (in particular if not an XML aficionado).  One view at the TXT is prudent as well.

Grüße, Carsten