Hi
A favourite topic revisited :-)
Frankly speaking, all other standards foras use MS-word (or simular) format and
as far as I can see it they seem to manage it, for instance OpenOffice can be
selected as document tool.
Plain ASCII worked well when RFC768 was specified. Today protocols and
algorithms are much more complex. You can easily find RFCs with flowcharts that
spans two pages, they easly get difficult to follow. Don't even think about
forumating complex equations...
If the intention is that the RFCs should survive a global nuclear war then
plain ASCII on stone tablets stored in some cave on Svalbard is likely the best
choice but I would not believe that people care about RFCs if sh-t hits the fan.
I strongly believe that it is at some stage time to consider more modern
document formats.
Regards
Ingemar
Message: 3
Date: Thu, 11 Mar 2010 20:24:58 +0100
From: Julian Reschke <julian(_dot_)reschke(_at_)gmx(_dot_)de>
Subject: Re: Why the normative form of IETF Standards is ASCII
To: Jorge Amodio <jmamodio(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com>
Cc: ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
Message-ID: <4B99438A(_dot_)8010803(_at_)gmx(_dot_)de>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
On 11.03.2010 19:44, Jorge Amodio wrote:
On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 11:12 AM, Julian
Reschke<julian(_dot_)reschke(_at_)gmx(_dot_)de> wrote:
On 11.03.2010 17:54, Jorge Amodio wrote:
Besides your eyes, (only one in some cases), you don't need any
extra junkware to be able to read the RFCs, even better, without
eyes you still can do it since text to speech works very
nicely with ASCII.
...
I'd claim that accessibility for properly authored HTML
will actually
be better, for instance the markup can express whether
something is
prose or artwork.
HTML uses ASCII as far as I remember, some tags, URIs and
URLs may be
impossible to decipher these days but still ASCII (I've to
admit that
some folks still use-abuse extended ASCII on HTML pages
instead proper
encoding and lang selection).
HTML actually uses Unicode. All current element and attribute
names are ASCII, in case you meant that.
I don't understand the second statement, you appear to mix up
character sets, encodings (and their declarations) with
language information.
About text to speech, it only takes a forward or going
trough one of
the stupid no context aware robo-translators and you will
get your t2s
interface reciting "gee tee ampersand semicolon greater
than eich ref
equal lower than bee greater than ..." I guess you get the point.
I believe this to be not true, as long as you use the right
tools (such as an HTML UA instead of a text editor).
And I agree with Martin, all other formats add a lot of unnecessary
crap to the documents, embedded fonts, meta-crap data,
hooks to track
document changes.
That's why we would need to talk about a profile of the
available features.
And ASCII is more eco-friendly :-)
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).
Best regards, Julian
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