Re: [Tools-arch] Recommendation 6: Architectural model for clients

[John Levine <[e-mail]>]

It appears that Martin Thomson  <[e-mail]> said:
>On Thu, Apr 29, 2021, at 11:12, John Levine wrote:
>> In principle, it's straightfoward to translate Word files into other
>> formats. (The file format is ISO/IEC 29500, a bunch of XML files in a
>> zip archive. The bad news is that the spec is over 5,000 pages.)
>> We could build tools to turn Word files into our dialect of
>> markdown or XML, give or take some negotiations about stylesheets
>> and markup conventions.
>
>Sounds good.  We probably need to stop saying "build" though.  I used code that I found on a website and it worked nicely.

While I am all in favor of using or adapting stuff that already
exists, I don't get the impression that you're offering to train all
the other IETFers that might want to use that code, fix bugs when
people find them, make sure it works on other systems than yours, and
so forth. Maybe "build" isn't the best word but the IETF has a budget
for tools so we can support the stuff we care about.

> I thought that the survey results were clear here on this point.  There are far too many people who use Joe Touch's Word
> template.  I think that it's clear that these people need a better alternative (or Joe's template needs some attention
> so that it can produce XML).

it does produce XML, but it's ISO 29500 XML, not our XML.  As I said, it should be possbible to build
tools that use style tags in their XML to translate to something that works better in our publication 
process but I would like to understand the whole path the documents take so we don't end up with something that
sort of works in theory but acutal authors don't use.

R's,
John

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