On 25-jun-2006, at 21:55, Stephen Sprunk wrote:
IMHO, this would be a very good rule; the IETF is supposedly about
running code, and complex equations that the average programmer
cannot understand without digging up a college math book are
unimplementable in the real world. Pseudocode is far, far more
valuable than pretty equations.
I agree one hundred percent. (Or 100%.)
IMHO, a direct result of the above is that any math that cannot be
described adequately in ASCII text does not belong in an RFC. This
is similar to the view that diagrams that cannot be represented in
ASCII art are too complex to be meaningful to the reader.
I'm not sure if I fully agree with that, maybe there are useful
diagrams that can't be preserved in ASCII. But nobody has presented a
convincing example so far.
The fact that other standards organizations and/or engineering
disciplines make extensive use of diagrams doesn't mean we should do
the same. It makes a lot of sense to describe a building with a
blueprint, because meaningful aspects of a building easily translate
into a graphical representation. This is not the case with a protocol
= software design. Traditionally, many kinds of diagrams have been
used here, but in my experience, with the exception of header format
diagrams, they rarely clarify as much as they seem to on first glance.
Every time this debate comes around, I am struck by the notion that
normative formats other than ASCII are a solution in search of a
problem. About the only argument I've read to date that makes sense
is to allow UTF-8 to access characters that do not exist in ASCII,
such as for authors' names or better line-drawing characters.
Everything else seems to fall into the "our specs aren't as pretty
as other SDOs' specs" category.
My conclusion, having participated in this discussion the past week
or so, is that there is that limiting ourselves to ASCII does indeed
cause inconvenience, but changing to a new format would cause MANY
more problems than it solves.
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