On Sat, Nov 26, 2011 at 15:52, Yaakov Stein <yaakov_s(_at_)rad(_dot_)com> wrote:
ASCII is already unreadable on many popular devices
Oh? For what reason? Sorry, I'm still using an incredibly stupid
phone, so I may be behind the curve on such changes. As far as I've
seen in my limited exposure, any difficulty is usually because it's
often not linewrapped well (or at all), forcing a lot of horizontal
scrolling, especially after being forced to be big enough to be
legible on tiny screens not held right up to the face. That's rather
inconvenient, but still a far cry from "unreadable" -- plus it's a
problem with the reader program (being too "featureless" to rewrap the
text), not anything inherent in the format.
ASCII *artwork*, yes, that often gets ruined by the refusal of many
programs to allow the user to display content in a monospaced font.
But that's not because it's in plain ASCII; you could say the same
thing of a Word or PDF document that incorporates "ASCII" art.
I am referring to the fact that more and more people are reading
documents on cell-phones and other small devices.
According to analysts, this will be the most popular platform for reading
material from the Internet within a few years.
But among what audience? End-users at large, yes, I can certainly
believe that. But techies, especially of sufficient caliber to even
*want* to read the IETF's output, let alone participate in creating
it? Very doubtful. I don't think we'll be giving up our laptops,
never mind large monitors, any time soon.
Phones and tablets are for content *consumption*. We are content
*creators*, be it programs, documents, or whatever. That's an
entirely different set of hardware requirements. When was the last
time you saw a program or document or anything else of significant
size, written using a phone, or even a tablet?
-Dave
--
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