ID-nits [was Re: suggestions (voting)]

Dean Willis dean.willis@softarmor.com
25 Nov 2002 13:23:42 -0600


> That is my question: How much time is spent making sure documents
> are 72 columns and contains something called "security considerations"
> as oposed to the other parts of the nits. Also if you had tags for
> abnf, mibs, schema etc etc you wouldn't need a highly paid IESG
> member just to run various syntax checkers.

It would probably save me several hours a month to have some sort of
tool that could just brute-force check things that can be brute-force
checked, like presence of required sections, validating BNF, and
test-compiling MIBs. 

Ideally, an author would have available a tool that they could run on
their document to fix the obvious stuff before bothering me with it. 

Although such a tool couldn't assure that something like a security
requirements section is well-written, it could as least make sure there
is one present, and that of it were obviously short raise a warning flag
like "We noticed your security requirements section is only 100
characters long. Is this adequate for the needs of this document?"

Once upon a time, I had a side job of providing editorial support to a
large number of graduate students for whom English  was not a native
language. Despite their weaknesses, I found the spelling and semantic
checkers in Microsoft Word to be very useful. I reduced my workload on
this task by at least 80% by insisting that the students revise
everything that Word underlined in red or green. This didn't make the
documents "perfect" but it did catch many common problems.

--
Dean