Behalf Of Tim Bray
Unfortunately,
most web browsers fail to preserve page breaks (FF characters) when
printing flat text files, which makes the resulting
documents hard to
read.
Turn this around; when printing HTML, the browser inserts
appropriate page breaks depending on the combination of font,
styling, and paper size that's in effect. This has the
effect that when you're arguing about some text, you have to
say "Look at 5.2.1.3, 2nd para" rather than "Look at page 13,
2nd para". It's not clear that this is any better or worse.
This is actually a rediscovery of something the medieval scribes
discovered (and Tim almost certainly knows more on this than I do)
Early codex manuscripts (books with pages) have foliation, not
pagination. That is there is one number per sheet of paper rather than a
separate number for each side. The original purpose of the marks was
probably to assist the production of the books rather than allow
citations but there is some use of citations.
Once people started to use foliation for citations they started to see
the disadvantages. Editions of the bible were particularly problematic
once people started attempting to cross reference translations back to
the original text. This was a particular problem with the old testament
as some parts of the vulgate are actually translations of translations.
The solution was to refer to scripture by chapter and verse.
In HTML there are three separate options for creating citations. You can
use style sheet pagination if you must but citations will be extremely
fragile and can be broken by any edit to the text. You can also use
section.subsection etc references which are more robust. The best method
though is to label each section with a name. That allows citations to
survive from one version of the document to another even if sections are
added or deleted.
On a point of information, most of the references I see in existing RFCs
are to sections in any case.
Phill
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