[rfc-i] Who uses Word, was Proposed new RFC submission requirements

[Julian Reschke]

On 2012-05-28 17:29, Joe Touch wrote:
>
> On May 28, 2012, at 1:28 AM, Julian Reschke wrote:
>
>> On 2012-05-28 05:47, Joe Touch wrote:
>>> ...
>>> Some use it to check code and abnf.
>>>
>>> If you're serious about automated tools, grammar and spelling count.
>>> ...
>>
>> There's no problem with people using Word to check grammar and spelling. But there *is* a problem if suddenly defects in Word's HTML output start to dumb down the submission format.
>
> IMO, there's a problem if the need for automated - vs manually assisted - checks to code and ABNF, and many other of the "requirements" that have come out of this discussion, such as containment marking suddenly dumb down our ability to use widely available word processing software to write an ID or RFC.

Wrt containment: hopefully we agree that we want automated generation of 
section numbers and section references. This implies that at some point 
the processes used to generate the publication formats understand what's 
nested into what, so that they can generate those.

We can either allow one of the things Word can generate as submission 
format (like now), but that implies that the RFC production center will 
have to deal with the conversion to the richer format. I believe we 
should avoid this, because it takes time, and we pay for that time.

Wrt spelling checking: I run aspell on my XML input.

Wrt grammar checks: yes, that's where Word really helps (in particular 
if it's not your mother language); I occasionally paste rfc2629.xslt's 
HTML output into Word to check. There, I said it.

Best regards, Julian