Re: how do we make the IETF working language work?

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On Tue, Mar 11, 2014 at 4:48 PM, Phillip Hallam-Baker <hallam@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>
>
> On Sun, Mar 9, 2014 at 5:16 PM, t.p. <daedulus@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "John Levine" <johnl@xxxxxxxxx>
>> To: <ietf@xxxxxxxx>
>> Sent: Sunday, March 09, 2014 6:31 PM
>> > >I'm more concerned with reading and writing.
>> >
>> > I still don't understand what this is supposed to mean in practice.
>> >
>> > There have been I-D's that desperately needed the help of a competent
>> > English speaker to rewrite parts where the language was so fractured
>> > that I couldn't figure it out.  In my experience, people with poor
>> > English skills who come to the IETF are doing the best they can, so
>> > this suggests that if you (the general you) see a draft of interest
>> > with language problems, it would be a good idea to offer to edit or
>> > coauthor it.
>>
>> How?  (seriously)
>>
>> I have tried editing the xml and get a sense of why it can be so hard to
>> write coherent English in that markup language.  I have tried editing
>> the text in the direction I think that it should go but then it is
>> unclear what changes I am suggesting.  I have tried my own markup
>> /*rgurnggkjik/regurgitate?/ which I understand but others do not:-(
>
>
> How about HTML?
>
> http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-hallambaker-rfctool-02
>
> I have a tool that does the conversion. I'll get it packaged up. Runs on
> Windows, Linux, OSX or any other platform supported by mono or .NET
>

I know that I am going to sound heretical, but I do not find  editing
XML by hand with a normal basic editor (e.g., jedit, gedit, emacs,
...) really hard.  It is annoying, I agree, with all those
<stuff>...</stuff>, but the markup does not interfere, in my opinion,
with the normal text meaning. [Disclaimer: I am a LaTeX user, so maybe
I am used to mixing (or shaking :) markup  and text and writing
without seeing the final outcome.]  I typically use jedit whose
XML-mode makes a good work in simplifying XML editing (e.g., closing
tags, suggesting node attributes, and so on).

The only difficulty that sometimes I experience is that you can get
lost in all the <section>...</section> nesting, so you do not know at
which nesting level you are.

Riccardo

>
>
> --
> Website: http://hallambaker.com/





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