[ncc-services-wg] Pre-PDP discussion: "All RIPE documents should be plain text"

On 30/03/2013 11:06, Philipp Kern wrote:
> ISO-8859-1 *and* UTF-8 content seems a tad ridiculous and backwards.

Would be cool to have them in the same document, though. I love this idea.
 It's so ... european.

But having said that, if Richi wants to aim towards IETF style document
processing with text and revisions and all that, could he at least go the
whole way and start out with a properly formulated problem statement so
that we can look at creating a BoF at RIPE66, which can be used as the
basis for creating a working group, which can then aim towards a framework
for solving the entire problem of document processing for RIR policy
publication.

I'm very much in favour of this multiple-incompatible-encoding-per-document
idea, but it's clear to me at this stage that we can only solve the problem
properly by handling it with a framework specification.  Lots of XML too,
because we all know that without a functional markup system, free text has
plenty of irksome limitations which are frankly a pain in the bum.
Structure is a necessity.

Honestly, I see scope for an entire stream of RFC style documents, which
has the added advantage that we could look at getting research funding for
the project and maybe get a couple of uni postgrads in on the act to make
sure we're fully buzzword compliant.  There's so much scope for argument
that College professors will fall over themselves in the rush to get
involved.  And I've no doubt either that we'll end up having to rewrite git
to improve the front-end and ensure that we don't end up with the sort of
back-end problems that recently almost trashed the KDE distribution.

Reliability is king here.  These are important documents which should be
enshrined for all eternity, full revision history included, and it would be
a gross abnegation of our duty to posterity if we we were to aim for
anything other than a 100% solution.  This is serious stuff we're
discussing, no doubt about it.  Careers could be made or broken on the
basis of these suggestions.  Lives could be lost and someone might not
think of the children.

Or alternatively, as Randy and Jim suggested, we could drop the whole
goddamned thing and concentrate on policy that's important rather than
pointlessly wasting time on window dressing, zomg.

Nick