--On Sunday, July 05, 2009 12:05 -0400 Melinda Shore
<melinda(_dot_)shore(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com> wrote:
...
You're heading into new territory, here. Right now
IETF documents are written in English and they're
displayable on a wider variety of hardware than HTML
is. 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.
Agreed.
I also find it fairly disturbing that we cannot seem to have any
discussion at all about RFC content, format, or methods of
production without also opening up and rehashing all of the
questions of:
* Why RFC's should not be published in Lower Slobbovian?
* Why the native RFC character set cannot be EBCDIC-32?
* Whether pictures are, or are not, better than text?
* Whether it is more important to optimize for passive
readability on, e.g., objects with small screens or for
searching, extraction, and editing?
* Whether someone's favorite tool for aiding in the
production of documents should be made mandatory or
prohibited entirely as a source of evil?
and so on. The questions, or at least a subset of them, are
important. But we never manage to reach consensus, partially I
think because we make different assumptions about what is
important, and that wastes a lot of time. Worse, these floods
of discussions tend to drive out small but useful improvements
by overwhelming any meaningful discussion of the proposed
changes themselves.
Sad.
john
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