Re: page headers in I-Ds

[Frank Strauß <strauss@ibr.cs.tu-bs.de>]

Juergen Schoenwaelder wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 06, 2006 at 03:03:26PM +0300, Romascanu, Dan (Dan) wrote:
>
> > I just encountered a case where smistrip did not perform well with an
> > I-D that passed the id-nits tool filter because it expected the page
> > headers to be formatted exactly as xml2rfc if formatting. 
> >  
> > However, life is more interesting, and some people still use nroff or
> > word. 
> >  
> > Does anyone know a reference that says how header format should look
> > like in an I-D, saying for example that "Internet Draft" is OK, but
> > "Internet-Draft" is not?
>
> I recall the times where ID was really easy to create because there
> were almost no rules, no legal blabla, and just someone who checked
> the name and put the file on an FTP server. I would love to go back to
> those times, but I realize that the IETF has passed the point of
> return.

I agree. The problem behind this issue is again the fact that 
computer-readable normative "code" (here MIB files) is placed into 
human-readable documents instead of a separate accordingly managed 
repository.

smistrip can only guess what to do in some situations. I admit, that it 
could be a bit more tolerant on page headers. :-) However, we will 
probably never solve the "problems" of
 - unnecessary line breaks just introduced to make the
   code fit into an I-D/RFC,
 - wrong indentation, and
 - unintended blank lines caused by page breaks in the
   containing document.

 -frank