Re: [Tools-discuss] Why do we even have text formats any more?

Carsten Bormann <cabo@tzi.org> Sun, 01 August 2021 15:55 UTC

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From: Carsten Bormann <cabo@tzi.org>
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Date: Sun, 01 Aug 2021 17:55:18 +0200
Cc: Michael Richardson <mcr+ietf@sandelman.ca>, tools-discuss@ietf.org
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To: Julian Reschke <julian.reschke@gmx.de>
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Subject: Re: [Tools-discuss] Why do we even have text formats any more?
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On 2021-07-31, at 06:31, Julian Reschke <julian.reschke@gmx.de> wrote:
> 
> "extra stuff" such as?

Wrong question.

Currently, we generate a TXT format from the XML, which (possibly among other renditions) is checked by the authors during AUTH48.  This format is there guaranteed to have the information that should survive a copy/paste into another text document (e.g., the comments in a program).

The HTML plus the not further defined, platform specific conversion from HTML to TXT does not give us these assurances.  So removing the TXT format removes reliable copy/paste into other plaintext documents.

2⁶⁴ becomes 264.  “ “ becomes   .  Etc.

(Note that there are occasionally discussions to remove information from the TXT format to make it look more like the HTML, in particular because it would sometimes require information from the authors to always do this information generation properly for the TXT form.  These discussions need to be informed by the need to copy/paste RFC snippets into plaintext documents.)

Grüße, Carsten