At 9:54 AM +0100 11/21/05, Julien(_dot_)Maisonneuve(_at_)alcatel(_dot_)com
wrote:
The IETF is probably the ONLY meaningful organisation in the world
that insists on using ascii-only specifications. Any rationalization
of that practise should try to explain why we are so exceptional
before embarking on specious arguments on the relative merits of
writing specs in morse code to improve design simplicity.
We are so exceptional because all of our old standards can be
implemented from as-is, without any possibly-lossy conversion.
Standards organizations that used, for example, Microsoft Word
version 2 for the PC, as their base document format, have had to
convert their documents multiple times for current users to be able
to read them. That conversion is sometime clean; often, it involves
(lossy) humans reformatting text and pictures.
As others have pointed out on this thread, the ASCII art in IETF
specs is (or should be) optional to implementers. The corollary is:
why bother to go to a format that uses something other than ASCII
art, if it is an optional component? Other than prettiness, what is
the advantage for our intended audience of protocol developers?
This is not to say that all RFCs do just fine with ASCII art. We have
non-standards documents, which we want the outside world to read,
that look silly with the current formatting restrictions. We live
with projecting that visual clumsiness, as geeks often do.
--Paul Hoffman, Director
--VPN Consortium
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