Thus spake "Julian Reschke" <julian(_dot_)reschke(_at_)gmx(_dot_)de>
Carroll, Diana C schrieb:
I think that whatever format is chosen, file size is an important
consideration. If you don't live/work in a major metropolitan area,
high-speed Internet connections are not available, and it can take
ridiculous amounts of time to download a single large .pdf or .doc file.
The IEEE standards are a good example, even on a high-speed
connection, downloading a single 200-page document takes
several minutes. ASCII is widely used because it is easy to
generate, has very small file sizes, and is viewable regardless of
operating system or platform. Any successor to ASCII needs to
have similar qualities in order to be successful. GIF and PNG files are
widely supported, but they also tend to be very
large files. At best, if these files are going to be included, they
need to be optional.
...
-rw-r--r-- 1 jre Kein 313253 Jun 18 20:38 rfc3253.xml
-rw-r--r-- 1 jre Kein 406626 Jun 18 20:42 rfc3253.html
-rwxr-xr-x 1 jre Kein 160576 Jun 18 20:56 rfc3253.chm
-rwxr-xr-x 1 jre Kein 413732 Jun 18 20:56 rfc3253.pdf
-rw-r--r-- 1 jre Kein 285569 Jun 19 18:18 rfc3253.txt
...by that measure we'd need to move to Microsoft Compiled Help Format,
right?
sprunk(_at_)defiant:~> ls -l rfc3253*
-rw-r--r-- 1 sprunk users 245514 Mar 4 2002 rfc3253.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 sprunk users 47077 Mar 4 2002 rfc3253.txt.gz
CHM files, like PDFs, are precompressed, so that's the amount you have to
actually send over a slow dialup line. HTML, XML, and TXT compress very
well, so just looking at file sizes is not a fair comparison in most cases.
Even if the access line doesn't support compression, hopefully most archives
of standards have something similar to Apache's mod_gzip so that the content
is sent compressed from the server itself.
Still, this is illuminating; I expected the PDF form to be a lot more than
69% larger than the uncompressed ASCII. Still, there's only a few rather
simple figures in that example, so it doesn't show how completely bloated
IETF specs may get if we allow complicated diagrams in the PDF (or whatever)
version but don't require them in a normative ASCII version too.
S
Stephen Sprunk "Stupid people surround themselves with smart
CCIE #3723 people. Smart people surround themselves with
K5SSS smart people who disagree with them." --Aaron Sorkin
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