--On Thursday, June 15, 2006 09:39 -0400 John R Levine
<johnl(_at_)iecc(_dot_)com> wrote:
But one of the important criteria for an acceptable alternate
form, one which came up in the earlier discussion on this
list, is that the format be searchable.
In case it wasn't clear, my quite informal suggestion was that
one might attach a few GIF illusttrations to an ASCII
document, sort of like a paper book that has a few color
plates glued in the back. I agree it would be nuts to put
text into GIF.
I continue to wonder whether what we should be doing here is not
to invent a new normative document format, but to figure out how
attach image-type figures to ASCII RFCs. "plates glued in the
back" is almost exactly the same as the analogy I have been
thinking about.
So, while I don't think this particular experiment, as
described, is plausible, there are two ideas I'd like to see
proposed, perhaps experimentally, for the future:
(1) A PDF approach, but with PDF carefully researched and
profiled (to include searchability and copy-and-paste extraction
in addition to stability and very wide availability for readers
and formatters) and a back-out plan should the community not be
happy about the experimental results.
(2) Some specific and well-thought out proposals for a "figure
supplement" to RFCs with multiple figures in a single file, good
naming conventions, and so on. A PDF file of figure-images
might be the right thing to use; there might be better ones.
But, as a strawman, we might have.
rfcNNNN.txt (as now) and
rfcNNNN-figs.pdf
Where rfcNNNN.txt would contain things like
Figure 3. A Left Handed Foogle (please see
supplement)
with or without a rudimentary ASCII drawing.
and rfcNNNN-figs.pdf would contain numbered and
captioned figures, one per page.
There are probably better ways to do this -- I haven't thought
through the details -- but I think that there is the core of an
interesting idea in this.
It would _not_ be a small experiment: it implies changes to our
archives, changes to indexing systems, more work for the RFC
Editor in verifying that figure numbers, captions, and content
were consistent between the ASCII RFC and the "plates", and so
on. But it would appear to me to point to a way forward that
would not share most of the disadvantages of normative PDF files.
john
p.s. When I said "should not have been last-called" in a prior
note, I wasn't trying to suggest that the _idea_ was obviously
dead or bad. I was trying to suggest, instead, that, when an
idea is discussed at length on the IETF list and a number of
issues raised with it, it is normal for the IESG to insist that
any version of the idea that is subsequently to be last-called
address most of those issues in some substantive way. "We
don't see X as a problem" may be appropriate; pretending
(deliberately or by accidental omission) that X was not raised
or discussed as an issue is usually not. The fraction of the
Last Call discussion that essentially duplicates the discussions
of some months ago is probably testimony to the wisdom of that
principle.
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