Re: Last Call: 'Proposed Experiment: Normative Format in Addition to ASCII Text' to Experimental RFC (draft-ash-alt-formats)

[Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer at nic.fr>]

On Wed, Jun 14, 2006 at 10:56:03AM -0400,
 The IESG <iesg-secretary at ietf.org> wrote 
 a message of 18 lines which said:

> - 'Proposed Experiment: Normative Format in Addition to ASCII Text '
>    <draft-ash-alt-formats-02.txt> as an Experimental RFC

This draft is a bad answer to a very real and important problem. I
agree with many of the nagtive remarks done on the IETF mailing list.

But I want to add one: authorizing an *output* format without the
corresponding *input* format (the "source") would be a very dangerous
step away from open formats. Because it would mean a great difficulty,
should we need to modify the RFC for a future version. Even a simple
bug fix would be difficult.

IMHO, IETF should always publish the "source" of its documents (the
current RFC process is far from perfect in that respect).

BTW, the draft completely fails to mention that there are text formats
which are better than ordinary raw ASCII and able to be automatically
translated to a nice rendering (typical candidates are LaTeX for
equations and Graphviz for state machines).

In short: no.

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