Jorge Amodio wrote:
I'd potentially agree if the format we actually use wouldn't have useless
page breaks that leave 25% of the pages unused. At least over here. I'd also
agree if that format would actually be usable on small devices like ebook
readers (where it's essential that you can reflow the text).
Agree, lot of white space.
Actually, the page breaks _are_ useful. Like when referencing specific
parts/paragraph in a document with an URL in a long section, e.g.
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5246#page-36
which contains the message flow of a full TLS handshake.
And that message flow is just perfect in ASCII arts.
Discussing parts of documents that are not ASCII text is extremely
difficult on IETF mailing lists and wastes huge amounts of network
bandwith if put in graphics attachments.
Unicode characters are also a Royal PITA in specs, because they're
non-discussable. There are extremely few people who can recognize
all unicode codepoints from their glyphs (and a number of them
can not be distinguished by their glyphs), and even worse, most
machines/environments do not even have fonts to display glyphs
for most of the unicode codepoints.
Having stuff that can only be copy&pasted for a large part of
the internet population, but neither typed nor displayed is
nothing that we need in our specs.
Using HTML or PDF for RFCs is about the same as moving from
English language RFCs to mandarin language RFCs. There is
a huge number of people who can read it, but there is a
also a large number of current RFC and I-D consumers and
producers which can not and does not want to use mandarin.
I do not doubt that there are tools available for heavy graphical
user interfaces and specific platforms that can deal with mandarin
just fine. But I do not understand mandarin, my tools can not cope
with it and a lot of my platforms and my environments can not cope
with it. HTML and pdf are only marginally better than mandarin.
Btw. printing out I-Ds and RFCs on paper (even 2-up and double sided)
has always been working just fine for me with tools like a2ps.
Printing out HTML is a royal pain and waste of paper. I don't know
what it is, but in 80% of the time when I print out Web content,
content is cut off at the right side (for both MSIE and Firefox
on Windows).
Printing PDF works, but reading PDF on screen is a royal PITA.
Even with a 1600x1200 screen, displaying a single page is
difficult to achieve -- and hardly legible with many PDFs that
I've come accross--and if you choose a legible size, then the page
doesn't fit and you have to page down to see the bottom of the page.
Getting 62 lines of pure ascii text with a legible font displayed
on a 1024x768 screen is much easier and much more legible.
And doing a 2-up of an RFC or I-D has a predictable legibility.
-Martin
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