Just so it does not get completely overlooked, I will point out that the
page numbers are also useful for the table of contents. And the ToC is
very helpful to me when I need to find something in the document. (Yes,
hyperlinks would help in many cases. But not all.)
The TOC is basically a link table with coarse-grained targets. It is
indeed often useful, but since it is mechanically generated from the
document's content, does it really matter whether it's stored as part
of the document, or generated on demand?
Since there are a lot of different ways to read and use an online
document, any format is a compromise. The current format was a fine
compromise in the 1970s since it looks good on a TTY or line printer
and is OK on a 24x80 green screen terminal. The tradeoffs are
different now, since some of us print them on 1200dpi page printers,
some read them on the tiny screen on a phone, and some of us use grep
followed by emacs.
I think it's reasonable to assume that going forward the vast majority
of users who read online documents will be able to use software that
can reformat them in various ways. This tells me that although the
publication form has to be readable in a pinch as plain text, it's
more important that it's amenable to mechanical processing. Tidily
formatted xml2rfc would be a reasonable candidate, and for backward
compatibility the public archives could easily contain both the new
form and a mechanically generated version that has numbered 60 line
pages and a TOC.
R's,
John
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