Re: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standa

On 7/3/09 at 10:16 AM +0200, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:

> On 3 jul 2009, at 0:35, Pete Resnick wrote:
>
> > > > > A much better solution would be HTML, if it's sufficiently constrained.
> > Or, gee, we could generalize to a very constrained XML format
> XML isn't a display format.
And how is this responsive to what I said?  Applications of XML 
(e.g., XHTML, xml2rfc with associated XSL files) provide perfectly 
good display info that are currently in use by all sorts of display 
platforms.
The choice of a particular markup language is irrelevant to the 
overall issue: We need to have text and semantic markup, instead of 
text with spaces and control characters to do page formatting as our 
canonical format.
> > As Dave put it, the current RFC format is "unfriendly, unnecessary, 
> > possibly unethical and just plain wrong." I'd remove the "possibly."
> Please elaborate; this statement goes far beyond the inconvenience 
> of having fixed line and page breaks and the lack of non-7-bit-ASCII 
> characters.
You bet it goes further: The current format is a horror to anyone who 
has to "read" the document on anything that does not visually display 
80 columns of fixed-width text. Try "reading" the text on a small 
handheld device. Try doing so with a text-to-speech application. Try 
magnifying it using apps meant for folks with limited vision. We have 
the ability to create text in a format that is easily interpreted by 
all of these devices and presented to the user with no loss of 
information. Using a page-layout format for our standards when page 
layout is completely unnecessary is at a minimum "unfriendly" to 
folks who want to use such devices, and (given that it is unnecessary 
to use page-layout) it is downright unethical and wrong to make it 
harder for folks who must use such devices.
Not being able to use characters in documents outside of the US-ASCII 
set is inconvenient (when they are part of the data stream of a 
protocol you wish to describe) and unfriendly (when the personal 
information about contributors cannot be properly provided). I'll 
leave off unethical there; it's still wrong.
> I wonder what people think about the need (or lack of need) to have 
> graphical images.
Images are *way* down the list of needs. Useful in some cases, but 
never necessary. Getting rid of a page-layout format as our 
authoritative form is primary. Using characters that do not occur in 
English is next down the list. Everything else is extra.
pr
--
Pete Resnick <http://www.qualcomm.com/~presnick/>
Qualcomm Incorporated - Direct phone: (858)651-4478, Fax: (858)651-1102
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