Open JayDaley opened 1 year ago
This issue seems reasonable, but it conflates publication of I-Ds with publication of RFCs. It is fine for a published RFC to have comments entered by the RPC or RPC tools.
Some comments in drafts are useful for future readers of the draft. If there is a policy to allow stripping of comments when drafts are published, it should be the option for the author to strip at the time of posting the draft, and not done automatically.
FYI on RPC procedures regarding document comments--comments regarding template information (e.g., "add your text here") and markdown are deleted during the editing process. If the XML comments contain author notes and it's unclear that they have been addressed, the editor asks the authors about them during AUTH48 and also informs the authors that all comments will be deleted before publishing. The stock AUTH48 question is the following:
<!-- [rfced] Some author comments are present in the XML. Please confirm
that no updates related to these comments are outstanding. Note that the
comments will be deleted prior to publication.
-->
Deletion of any remaining XML comments occurs during AUTH48-DONE.
A number of people have noted that they regularly add comments to I-Ds that they do not want included when the I-D is submitted. Sometimes this is because those are private, other times it is because they are notes to themselves and not relevant to the document. Currently those people have reported that they then need to process their source file before submission, which in some cases means that they have an XML source that the process into plain text and submit that plain text, which is sub-optimal as it loses the benefits of XML submission.
We could consider supporting this with a language feature that specifically identified such comments and then have the tooling remove those comments on submission. Alternatively, we could just have I-D submission automatically strip all XML comments unless people specifically ask it not to. It is unclear if the latter option is a sufficient change in practice to require any discussion outside of tools-discuss.