[ntp:questions] Resolution and Precision

Ryan Malayter malayter at gmail.com
Fri Feb 16 22:07:31 UTC 2007


On Feb 16, 12:19 pm, "David L. Mills" <m... at udel.edu> wrote:
> You scratch a really contentious itch. The PDF report you found was my
> submission to the NTP working group, but it is not in Postel ASCII as
> required by the IETF. The Postel ASCII is the .txt format you found, but
> it has not been formated as Postel ASCII yet. BOth documents are
> intended to describe the same specification; however, the .txt document,
> which has been wordsmithed somewhat from the PDF, is probably the
> definitive document.

Isn't the formatting of long text files why undergraduate research
assistants were invented? I would have done the work as a CS undergrad
if I could have gotten my name attached to an RFC for a widely used
protocol. ;-)

Seriously, though, I cannot figure out why there is not more of an
uproar against the IETF using ASCII formatting these days, especially
with the globalization of the Internet. It would seem that the logical
thing for them to do would be to define an XML schema for RFCs, and
require submissions in that format, which can then be translated into
HTML, ASCII, whatever. Or require OpenDoc, or some other rich format.
But there are a lot of XML haters out there, even though this is one
application for which XML was actually intended.

Regards,
Ryan




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