On Sun, Jul 5, 2009 at 9:05 AM, Melinda
Shore<melinda(_dot_)shore(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com> wrote:
You're heading into new territory, here.
No, I disagreed with an unqualified assertion you made using the
extremely well-defined term"ASCII". As others have pointed out,
progress is being impeded by the conflation of a bunch of different
issues, so let's try and be careful about our assertions.
Right now
IETF documents are written in English and they're
displayable on a wider variety of hardware than HTML
is.
I don't think that the second part of your assertion is correct. I'm
not trying to be difficult. I introduce by example the huge number of
mobile devices that handle HTML effortlessly and IETF legacy ASCII not
at all. Also, the large number of standard office printers that print
HTML instantly and correctly at the touch of control- or command-P,
but can render IETF legacy ASCII on paper only with various gyrations
and sidesteps.
As I mentioned in the mail to which you're responding,
I think the choice of formats tends to support more
openness and accessibility. I think you're implicitly
arguing that that's not the right tradeoff, and frankly
I think it's exactly the right tradeoff, myself.
I think that we're in agreement as to objectives: openness,
accessibility, and usability. My claim is that a carefully considered
and constrained flavor of HTML would meet those objectives better than
IETF legacy ASCII. I claim that this is true exclusive of whatever
consensus develops around the issues of i18n and the introduction of
graphics.
(There may be a disagreement in that I would tend to place more weight
than some others on the needs of spec consumers compared to those of
producers.)
-Tim
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