Hello;
I suspect that there is a lot more reliance of non-ASCII art out
there than
is officially admitted.
I do not know how, for example, you can understand the PIMv2 state
machine without reference to the (non-ASCII) diagrams provided in the
(non-ASCII) version of the draft.
Regards
Marshall Eubanks
On Nov 16, 2005, at 7:29 AM, Stewart Bryant wrote:
It's interesting that when authors turn up at IETF to explain
their work/resolve issues etc they use colored diagrams
to do so - not ASCII art.
Some of this is fashionable, but in many cases it is to
clearly articulate a point in the very little time made available.
I don't see why such powerful techniques shouldn't
be applied to the specifications themselves to allow the reader
to most grasp what is being said with the minimum effort.
I am afraid that I don't subscribe to the hair shirt approach to
drawings. I think that they should be exactly fit for purpose
neither too complex, nor too simple, and that the need to
work round the limits of 72 ASCII characters should not be
a constraint that limits the clarity of expression.
For example look at slides 5 and 6 in
http://www3.ietf.org/proceedings/05nov/slides/pwe3-2.ppt
and compare to figure1 in
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-balus-bocci-martini-dyn-
ms-pwe3-00.txt
The latter shows the components of the system, but it is impossible
to put the detail shown in the slides into the diagrams in the
specification itself with our current tools.
Look at the figures in
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-bocci-bryant-pwe3-ms-pw-
arch-01.txt
particularly figure 8. We are at the limit of what we can describe
in these diagrams.
I can also find examples in the IP Fast Re-route work where we
struggle to show network snippets in ASCII with the associated
addressing and subsequent tunneling, and yet the operation is
simple to show in ppt, pdf, etc etc, particularly with colour.
Another example - many of the ideas that we talk about in the IETF
start life as a few coloured lines on a large whiteboard -
because that is the simplest way to visualise these ideas and
to express them for the first time to our peers. That style
of expression therefore seems to the specifications
themselves and for exactly the same reason - clarity.
Perhaps it is because the work that I do is mainly on overlay
network techniques where it is necessary to describe how the
virtual network maps onto the physical network that I find
difficulty producing clear ASCII art, but I would be surprised
if I were alone in that view.
If we think that ASCII art is all that is needed, perhaps - as an
experiment - we should forbid the use of anything other than
ASCII art in presentations at the next IETF?
- Stewart
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