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Re: Why the normative form of IETF Standards is ASCII

2010-03-12 15:12:50
Julian Reschke wrote:

I'm at the end of your mail, but you haven't told me how printing the 
example document I pointed to worked for you. Did you try? If not, why not?

You mean this one:

It would be nice if you could elaborate on what the problem is. Try, for 
instance, printing <http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/rfc2616.html>.

OUCH!

Printing:

On the printer, it comes out with a line length of 131 characters
(paper size A4, portrait, one-up).  US-letter is wider, so that might
be even worse.  The font size appears to be like ~6 pt and very thin,
it comes out grey.  Comparing it to an I-D that I printed 2-up in 1996,
it uses much smaller characters.  The I-D is 2 columns because of 
the 2-up printing.  The use of a sans-serif font also makes this
html-rfc harder to read on printout than my a2ps formatted I-D from 1996.

That's an absolute disaster!


Screen-Reading:

Opening it in my Tabbed browser (firefox) renders it in an similarly
illegible fashion (I have a 1600x1200 monitor).  For resizing it to a
legible line length, I have to resize all my other open tabs as well,
which is a nuisance (Zooming is worse, because it also reduces
the number of visible lines).


The version at http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616 comes up with a
perfect rendering instantly in my browser.  The line length is
easy on the eyes, the font is more readable (to my eyes anyway).

So the ASCII-format has a significant lead over that particularly
poor example of HTML.


-Martin

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