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Re: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

2009-07-05 12:06:13
Tim Bray wrote:
On Sun, Jul 5, 2009 at 6:27 AM, Melinda 
Shore<melinda(_dot_)shore(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com> wrote:
Right now ascii text is probably the most widely-supported
display format.
This statement is violently counter-intuitive and shouldn't be
accepted unsupported by evidence.
- ASCII is not usable for the languages of a large majority of the
world's population.
- For electronic consumption of texts longer than SMS messages, HTML
is the most widely-used display format, probably followed by PDF.
- For print consumption, the use of modern typographic techniques -
real quotation marks, dashes, accented characters if only for usages
like café and coöperate - is generally seen as required, so ASCII is
very seldom used.
ASCII-only is a primitive leftover from the
typographically-impoverished dawn of computing.  Can we get over it
already?

You're heading into new territory, here.  Right now
IETF documents are written in English and they're
displayable on a wider variety of hardware than HTML
is.  As I mentioned in the mail to which you're responding,
I think the choice of formats tends to support more
openness and accessibility.  I think you're implicitly
arguing that that's not the right tradeoff, and frankly
I think it's exactly the right tradeoff, myself.

Melinda

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