John,
You mean that we should update the current medieval print format to
take advantage of the best technology available to the Victorians?
Why go to all that trouble to create infrastructure to support an
obsolete document format when we can get all the infrastructure required to
support a modern, open format that delivers professional results for free?
Moreover there is a much higher probability that third party tools will
support a common W3C/IETF format than an IETF only format.
Phill
-----Original Message-----
From: John C Klensin [mailto:john-ietf(_at_)jck(_dot_)com]
Sent: Friday, June 16, 2006 1:14 PM
To: John R Levine
Cc: ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
Subject: Image attachments to ASCII RFCs (was: Re: Last Call:
'Proposed Experiment: Normative Format in Addition to ASCII
Text' to Experimental RFC (draft-ash-alt-formats))
--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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