Re: [Tools-discuss] .txt? [I-D Action: draft-xxx.txt]

[Warren Kumari <[e-mail]>]

On Mon, Jun 28, 2021 at 5:48 PM Brian E Carpenter
<[e-mail]> wrote:
>
> > I still don't know what else i as an author
> > would benefit from in v3.
>
> 1. A very nice looking HTML result instead of a geeky thing.

This is working on the assumption that I *wanted* an HTML result and
not a "geeky thing" which has 50+ years of deployment, tradition and
recognizable look-and-feel. The falls into the bug, not feature bucket
for me.

> 2. UTF-8

Ok, this one I like.

> 3. SVG. Hard work to use, but well worth it.

Again, see #1. I believe that requiring that complex things be
explainable using ASCII art was a feature - if your protocol is
sufficiently complex that it cannot be easily explained using words
and ascii art, it's probably too complex.


> 4. Using tools that are currently maintained.

Tools like the XML2RFC XMLMind plugin were working just fine with the
V2 format; every few years I'd release a new version when XMLMind
updated their major version, but it was literally just a version bump.
Same thing for my "copy the last RFC, change the title and words". #4
sounds very much like "people weren't keeping the tools maintained the
way we liked, so we made a breaking change to force them to abandon
what they were doing, and use what we think is better.

Anyway, I realize that this ship has sailed, and I'm doing a good
impression of "Old Man Yells at Cloud"... but someone asked why more
stuff wasn't being submitted in v3 format, and this is at least one
set of reasons why...

W

>
> I've had no trouble at all editing XML in v3. The only real
> annoyance is that the converter can't do anything sensible with
> <vspace blankLines="1"/> which I used to use a lot. Everything
> else is trivial.
>
> (The converter insists on inserting lots of format="default"
> and toc="default" which are just noise and can be deleted.)
>
> Regards
>    Brian
>
> On 29-Jun-21 07:38, Toerless Eckert wrote:
> > I only converted the last rfc i was editor for during the final revisions to go to rfc,
> > and i only did this so i could use the only one new feature of v3 that i felt i wanted
> > to use, name the Contributors tag. I still don't know what else i as an author
> > would benefit from in v3.
> >
> > I did find the conversion sufficient for that last mile to RFC editor, but not persuasive to
> > suggest it to authors if/when they want to continue doing mayor edits to the document. This
> > is primarily beceause the v3 ended up with a tag-verbose XMLv3 than the v2 i had
> > edited for years. This specifically included inlining the rfc/draft references as opposed
> > to keeping the references, but also several other tags that where written out more verbosely
> > and with a lot of default parameters (unnecessarily).  Hope i remember this all correctly.
> >
> > This v2->v3 conversion process feels a bit like attempting to have a good idea but then
> > outsource the conversion cost.  Reminds me of linux. Great new SDK/Library, but now all
> > the third-party apps developed against an older version have to be rewritten. In comparison,
> > in Windows i can have 10 versions of the same core SDK co-installed and all the old but
> > still useful programs will still run. But no linux distributions do not support such slotting
> > or do not compile all old library versions, and library developers don't care about supporting
> > multi-slotting... *sigh*
> >
> > Chers
> >     Toerless
> >
> > On Sat, Jun 26, 2021 at 10:40:40PM -0400, John R Levine wrote:
> >>>> Among the many things on the to-do list is to redo the I-D submission page
> >>>> to make it clearer that you only need to submit one version of a draft,
> >>>> and that we'd appreciate the XML version if you have one.
> >>>
> >>> Excellent. Is there any reason not to run the v2 to v3 converter automatically?
> >>
> >> We really want people to stop using v2.  It's obsolete and missing some
> >> semantic features of v3.
> >>
> >> Regards,
> >> John Levine, [e-mail], Taughannock Networks, Trumansburg NY
> >> Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly
> >>
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>
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-- 
The computing scientist’s main challenge is not to get confused by the
complexities of his own making.
  -- E. W. Dijkstra