On 01/05/2006 11:28 AM, John C Klensin allegedly wrote:
Even those of us who are strongly supportive of ASCII as our
primary base format and those who believe that the effort needed
to simplify illustrations and diagrams sufficiently that they
can be accurately represented in ASCII artwork is helpful in
forcing clarity are reluctant to say "never".
Unless the IESG has changed the rules while I was not looking,
it has been permitted to post I-Ds in PDF in addition to ASCII
for some years.
Yes. I support ASCII as the output format. I appreciate the
discipline it encourages of separating protocol specification from
descriptive text and figures, and of being very clear about state
machines, etc. However, there are cases where descriptive text and
figures are much more informative in some other format, so I wouldn't
say never (nor should I be forced into a position of choosing between
never and always).
I find it interesting that it has not been taken
advantage of more often (and, for the record, I'm one of those
who has taken advantage of it).
For heuristic value ... Do you think there is a correlation between
restricting ourselves to formats which are good for protocol
specifications but not much else, and the skew in our success record
toward problems solved by protocol specifications as opposed to the
really complex system problems? :-)
By the way, I like emacs picture mode. You can bind the keypad keys
so that e.g. "3" means "draw toward the upper right".
swb
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