[rfc-i] feedback on draft-hoffman-rfcformat-canon-others-00,

[Martin Rex]

Paul Hoffman wrote:
> 
>Martin Rex wrote:
>>> 
>>> Brian E Carpenter wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> I would prefer that CR/NL/LF/TAB are allowed but treated as a single space.
>>>> Isn't that how they are treated in *ML anyway?
>>> 
>> Why should the canonical format be delibertately obfuscated so that
>> it can only be displayed, edited and produced by special tools?
>
> Can you say why plain text with line breaks at the end of paragraphs and
> in art can only be displayed "by special tools"?
> Or edited "by special tools"? Every text editor I have used for the
> past decade on multiple OS platforms can display and edit such files.
> I'm not sure what could be less "deliberately obfuscated" than plain text,
> but you often see things a tad differently.

A requirement that paragraph must be a single line rather than
reasonably wrapped is a clear obfuscation technique.  Numerous
ASCII editors have limit on line lengths, and navigating within
single-line paragraphs for the purpose of editing is often even
more painful.

Why editing? Maybe to apply errata before printing a document out.
I regularly print RFCs out before implementing them.


> 
> Quite frankly, I don't care what tools the RFC Editor uses to create any
> of the formats. It would be grand if they shared them with us, but it
> doesn't really matter as long as the input to the RFC process can be done
> with a reasonable toolset.

Avoid syntactic restrictions that significantly limit what tools *OTHERS*
can use.

-Martin