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

Michael Richardson <mcr+ietf@sandelman.ca> Wed, 28 July 2021 15:42 UTC

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From: Michael Richardson <mcr+ietf@sandelman.ca>
To: Martin Thomson <mt@lowentropy.net>, tools-discuss@ietf.org
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Date: Wed, 28 Jul 2021 11:42:42 -0400
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Subject: Re: [Tools-discuss] Why do we even have text formats any more?
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Martin Thomson <mt@lowentropy.net> wrote:
    > I realize that this might be a little inflammatory as far as subjects
    > go, but bear with me.

    > There are probably a few narrow cases where rendering plain text is
    > better than HTML.

The time when it's nice to have actual .txt files is when writing code, and
one needs to search for, and then copy and pasting bits of requirement into the code.
But, if I'm really working on such a document, I can run xml2rfc -o text myself.

    > Here's an alternative: style the HTML so that it looks like the text.  I tried this and it worked shockingly well.

    > Repo: https://github.com/martinthomson/rfc-txt-html
    > Demo: https://martinthomson.github.io/rfc-txt-html/diff.html

    > This isn't perfect, but it seems pretty good to me.

I agree: it looks great.
I also agree that we should obsolete the htmlizer.

--
Michael Richardson <mcr+IETF@sandelman.ca>   . o O ( IPv6 IøT consulting )
           Sandelman Software Works Inc, Ottawa and Worldwide

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