On 9/4/03 at 12:20 PM -0600, Vernon Schryver wrote:
This week we've heard complaints that pagination and line-breaking
in the .txt RFCs is rigid, as if that were a bug instead of a vital
feature.
Consider the problem of answering the question "Is the RFC on my
screen or printer the same as your document? Was either version
edited by someone or something?"
So when I read an RFC on my Palm and all of the line breaks are in
different places, or when Sam Hartman listens to an RFC with a
text-to-speech engine, the fact that it is not the "same" as your
document (for your implied values of "same") is seen as a "vital
feature" and not a bug? I'm sorry, Vern, but this argument is utter
nonsense. Though I do oppose immediately converting the RFC archive
to XML for all sorts of reasons, the fact that a markup language
allows you to output identical content in different formats is not
one of those reasons.
*If* a restricted form of XML (or any markup language) could be shown
to reliably preserve semantic content of a standard (and pagination
and line-breaks should never be a part of semantic content) but could
produce output for different environments, I'd consider that a big
feature. The problem is that it will take some serious work to get an
appropriately restricted form of such a markup language to make it
reasonable as the canonical form of standards documents. But I think
this small step of making XML available in the I-Ds is a good thing
for other reasons and might give us enough info to tell whether XML
would be viable in the long run for RFCs.
pr
--
Pete Resnick <mailto:presnick(_at_)qualcomm(_dot_)com>
QUALCOMM Incorporated - Direct phone: (858)651-4478, Fax: (858)651-1102