Subject: [Tools-discuss] New ITU-T document access tool

From: "Stephan Wenger" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 7 Dec 2005 04:49:44 +0200

Folks,

I usually don't read or post to this list.  Please bear with me if this is
old news. 

The "bellheads" of the ITU-T have put together a pretty decent looking
document access mechanism that covers all their Study Group level documents
(they also have lower level "Rapporteur's meeting" documents, which are not
yet accessible through the system).  It's implemented in ASP :-( and
structured around meetings, so it's likely not directly applicable for us.
"Decent looking" is also a matter of personal taste.  However, I think it's
a great tool for them, and some of the ideas would be quite helpful at least
for me, if implemented in the IETF as well.  Check it out:
http://www.itu.int/ITU-T/meetingdocs/index.asp

Some of the concepts I like and haven't seen in the IETF are
- a very compact representation of the key properties of each file, e.g.
date, authors, title, and group to which this document belongs.
- All working documents (corresponding to I-Ds and WG administrative
documents, i.e. charters, reports, ...) available from one site.  In the
IETF case, where we don't charge for the RFCs we produce, they could be
integrated as well
- means to "shop" for documents, select them, and have the whole selection
as a zip file shipped to you by email.  For our small docs, a tarball would
do as well
- autoconverters to PDF etc.  For them perhaps more important than for us,
as they need to worry about all those different software versions.

This is not a "demand for implementation" or something, it's just a pointer
to something useful.

Regards,
Stephan

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From: Henrik Levkowetz <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 07 Dec 2005 22:48:25 +0100

Hi Stephan,

    Some nice ideas here.  Adding Authors and also an Abstract to the
WG pages (under http://tools.ietf.org/wg/ ) is something which has crossed
my mind, but is waiting for time.  Auto-conversion of txt documents to html
and PDF is already in place, but not fully integrated into the WG pages
yet - I'm working on that.  Tarballing is also something which would be
nice, although I'm not sure how important that would be in practice.  I
checked if Apache had a capability like that built-in a few months ago, but
when I didn't find anything, I left it.  Converting all the WG pages to
static pages, so they could be rsynced has been on my mind for a while,
though.

Of the features available through the ITU-T document access tool, what
are the 2 most valuable which are not currently available through the
WG pages, to your thinking?

	Henrik

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From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 16 Dec 2005 09:39:20 +0100

Don't forget that the ITU-T Secretariat has a large staff and a budget
around ten times the IETF's. So we can certainly pick out good ideas,
but we will have to be selective.

This appears to be organized by SG. So are we; I normally find drafts
and RFCs via http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/wg-dir.html
and http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/OLD/index.html. What's missing
there are links to meeting minutes - would that be a good idea?

     Brian