Mapping (was: Issues lists and the "preprocessing" topic)

[Mark Davis]

Mark


On Fri, Aug 22, 2008 at 4:45 PM, John C Klensin <klensin at jck.com> wrote:

>
> I've tried marking up copies of Rationale and Protocol to
> identify the material that would need to be moved (and, in most
> cases, rewritten... it is not a simple move) from one to the
> other to eliminate all normative material from Rationale.    The
> very sensitive U-label/ A-label/
> whatever-we-call-the-other-things definitions are examples of
> the problem of normative material that is needed to understand
> important non-normative parts of Rationale.  There are some
> subjective judgment calls and a good deal of text that would
> have to either be duplicated to permit Rationale to continue to
> make sense or we would have to require that readers of Rationale
> read and understand major sections of Protocol first.


It is perfectly appropriate for a "commentary" document to reference
normative definitions in the actual specification. The important thing is
for the protocol document to be a complete specification, and not require
bits and pieces from what is suppose to be an explanatory accompanying
document.

I can well sympathize with your desire to avoid this kind of work -- I was
probably just as resistant when I was pushed into doing a same thing with a
Unicode specification that I had the pen on. But the results are so much
cleaner and clearer that I think it is work that simply needs to be done.
Either that, or I think just remove the rationale document entirely at this
point, and just move the normative content into protocol.

The problem with the rationale document as it exists now is that it is still
full of controversial material, material that is actually not necessary for
delivery of IDNA2008. We will end up just spinning on that material when it
is not the main focus. Far better would it be to just concentrate on the
normative material that we have to have as part of IDNA2008; informative /
tutorial material can always follow on later.

Mark
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