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Re: Call for Comment: "RFC Format Requirements and Future Development"

2013-03-02 06:50:27
----- Original Message -----
From: "John Levine" <johnl(_at_)taugh(_dot_)com>
To: <ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org>
Cc: <daedulus(_at_)btconnect(_dot_)com>
Sent: Friday, March 01, 2013 7:44 PM

There should be an immutable requirement that any alternative format
MUST NOT increase the size by more than a factor of two compared to
ASCII text.

So you're saying you're unalterably opposed to the RFC editor
providing
PDF, HTML, epub, mobipocket, and every other format that people
actually
use on modern computers, as well as anything that includes reasonably
legible images?

I am opposed to the careless, thoughtless use of these formats which
causes a massive increase in the resources needed to do anything with
them; I quoted a 16-fold increase in one that came from another SDO but
I have seen 50-fold increases in ones from individuals.

Look under the covers and the markup being used in a way that seems
designed to maximise resource usage.  With *ML, there may be tens of
kilobytes of css which seems to a logical 'or' of anything used anytime
in an organisation; or code translation tables that make UCS seem small;
or applying markup that is no different to the default to each and every
paragraph such as

BORDER-RIGHT: medium none; BORDER-TOP: medium none; VERTICAL-ALIGN:
middle; BORDER-LEFT: medium none; CURSOR: pointer; COLOR: #FFFFFF;
BORDER-BOTTOM: medium none;
FONT-SIZE: 12px; FONT-FAMILY: Arial Unicode MS, san-serif

(The worst offenders seem to documents that have been converted from
MS-Word into something else).

Look at RFC and the XML that goes into it, and a ratio of two to one,
input to output text, is generous on any document of reasonable size.

It is harder to look inside a pdf and see why the same document can be
20kbyte or 100kbyte but I would appeark that a similar consideration
applies.

Impose no limit and you could get a 16-fold increase in the resources
needed.  Great for mobile phone operators and hardware manufacturers,
bad news for those who want to progress the work of the IETF.

Tom Petch

If that's not what you mean, what DO you mean?  We all seem to agree
that we want to continue to provide the traditional line printer image
format, but on today's Internet where 20Mb/sec cable modems aren't
particularly fast, it's silly to demand that documents be sized for
floppy disks.


R's,
John