[rfc-i] transition plan for choosing alternative format for RFCs

[Julian Reschke]

On 2012-03-26 11:57, Leonard Rosenthol wrote:
>> The odds of convincing vanilla Word to output reasonable
>> semantically-relevant machine-readable output seem comically small.
>>
> I would agree with that sentence because of the addition of the word
> "vanilla" before Word.
>
> HOWEVER, the use of plugins to MSWord to provide improved output
> capabilities is well established and has been part of the
> workflow/ecosystem of many for at least a decade or more.  Is the addition
> of a plugin to Word any more/less reasonable than a completely separate
> tool (eg. xml2rfc)??
>
> I have no specific preference for or against the use of the .doc or .docx
> formats, but I would like to refute your position below on pure technical
> grounds.
>
> 1 - Both .doc and .docx are human-editable, obviously
> 2 - .docx is an XML-based format with rich semantics and transformable to
> other formats using standard tooling
 > ...

I'm not sure about the semantics being rich enough, and I definitively 
would like to see an example transformation (I tried that many years ago 
and found that although the format was XML, lots of information still 
was sitting in attribute values with an undocumented microsyntax; but 
things may have improved since that).

Best regards, Julian