Re: British or American spelling in IETF docs

Hi John,
At 07:15 AM 14-08-2026, John C Klensin wrote:
>More importantly, most (almost certainly not all) other SDOs use a
>process in which professional SDO staff, including editors, have
>control of the document text at a far earlier stage than occurs in
>the IETF process.  That leads to a least two differences from the
>IETF -> RFC process: (i) By the time a document approaches
>publication, there are no designated/listed authors or even editors
>and (ii) The style of any particular documents, and the style of all
>or most documents produced by other SDOs, is whatever those staff
>editors write (and therefore say it is).  There may be, and usually
>are, style manuals but the interpretation of those manuals is
>ultimately up to the same staff editors.  While that model has
>several disadvantages relative the IETF one, it ensures a high degree
>of consistency, eliminates the argument of this thread, and, fwiw,
>eliminates many arguments about ownership, change control, and
>copyright because the resulting documents are unambiguously works for
>hire by the SDO or its parent organization.

The cost for spell-checking a document is $13.  An author can skip 
that charge by running, for example, hunspell.  There is a natural 
language linter (Vale) which can be used to align a document with a 
style guide.  The advantages of a style guide is that it can be used 
to promote consistency and clarity.  That is, in my opinion, more 
important than discussing which variant of the English language to use.

The model used by this community is:

   (a) Author writes a draft.

   (b) Other people send comments and suggest text.

   (c) If the draft is approved, it goes to copy editing.

The persons in (a) or (b) do not necessarily have copy editing 
skills.  The document which goes to (c) would probably diverge from 
what was approved.  I gather that eliminating the divergence is not a 
viable option as it means giving up authorship.

Once in a while, a working group creates cartoonish terms.  It can be 
somewhat difficult to explain a few of those terms in simplified 
technical English.  It could be said that is what happens when a 
person spent too many hours watching a coyote trying to catch a bird.

Regards,
S. Moonesamy