On 6 jul 2009, at 12:08, Melinda Shore wrote:
Plus, there appears to be a certain amount
of whimsy involved with rendering HTML and displays can be
inconsistent, which 1) is one of the complaints about the
current format, and 2) is undesirable for the display of
technical specifications.
I disagree with 2. Today, drafts and RFCs have a fixed format, that
should render the same on all displays and in print (barring font
differences, but I guess Courier is assumed). Although this format
isn't particularly pretty and current mainstream tools can no longer
create it, this format has a lot going for it:
- pretty much everything that can classified as a computing device can
display it natively
- should the need arise to write an implementation for display
software from scratch, that would be extremely trivial
- no issues with copy/paste
- compatible with lots of tools
However, it has one big issue: it doesn't adapt to the properties of
the display gracefully. (Or at all, really.)
This is the part that would be easy to fix by adopting a very basic
flavor of HTML. This would give us line wrap and the ability to use
tables, but we'd lose the headers/footers. ASCII art could still be
used as preformatted text. This type of basic HTML will render
slightly differently on different implementations, but that's the
point. Unless technical meaning is encoded in spaces and line breaks,
this shouldn't matter.
And even in basic HTML, it's possible to add class specifications etc
that allow tools to apply more intelligence than would be possible
with plain text.
_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
Ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf