[tao-discuss] Glitches in Tao of the IETF Revision

[Stuart Cheshire <[e-mail]>]

This weekend I reviewed “Tao of the IETF - Possible Revision”

<https://www.ietf.org/about/participate/tao/tao-possible-revision/>

I think this is a great improvement over the existing document, and should be made official as soon as possible. The current version is seven years old now, and some important things have changed in that time. Also, some attitudes have changed too, and the new wording reflects this appropriately:

attendance → participation
novices → newcomers
http → https

The new revision remains light-hearted, but omits some of the excessively frivolous text from the 2012 version. Some of those inside jokes were arguably funny, but inside jokes are precisely what is *not* salient to a newcomer.

I did notice a few glitches:

Sometimes the web page appears blank. Start with a wide web browser window, as wide as your screen allows, blank. Then open <https://www.ietf.org/about/participate/tao/tao-possible-revision/>. if your window is wide enough you should see the little table of floating links top right. Now make the web browser window narrower until the little table of floating links disappears. The entire page content disappears with it, and the entire top half of the scrollable page content area becomes blank space.

There are several places where the text switches to monospaced font. Is this intentional?

There are several places where “a href” tags appear in the text, e.g.:

> A good summary of this can be found in the aptly titled <a href="https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1796">RFC 1796</a>, "Not All RFCs Are Standards”.

In the Table of Contents all the main section numbers are off by one. And I don’t think the Table of Contents itself needs to be entry number 1 in the Table of Contents (which I think is the cause of them being off by one).

The main section heading numbering in the body text is messed up. For example:

12. Introduction (Should be section 1)

All the other main section heading numbers in the body text, that should be 2, 3, 4, 5, etc., all appear with number “1”.

There are a few other minor spelling and grammar typos I noticed. If this document lives in a Git repository or similar, let me know and I’m happy to contribute a Git pull request with my suggested fixes.

Stuart Cheshire