John Levine wrote:
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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 agree that a strict size limitation would interfere badly with
formats that include graphics. But that doesn't mean that all graphics
are equal. I'm aware of one notoriously stupid Office suite that
inserts truecolor BMP images by default, and it is actually difficult
to conceive a worse default behaviour...
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.
While there might be cable modems with 20Mb/sec available to some,
this is far from being the common internet access bandwidth.
My 6MBit/s DSL subscription at home comes out as ~2MBit/s. It used
to be close to 4MBit/s in early 2008, but there seems to have been
a rush in subscriptions over the past few years that impairs what I get.
I only get ~ 5-10 MBit/s net from my WLAN (8 neighboring WLANs competing).
For mobile devices, unless you're willing to pay a premium monthly fee,
the commonly available bandwidth seems to be more like 384kBit/s.
On my last vacation in Italy, the hotel offered a public WLAN
(no registration required), but the bandwidth was averaging around
300 KBit/s.
Limiting the waste of network bandwidth seems like a desirable goal,
no matter how I look at it, from the "waiting for download" perspective
as well as the environmental impact.
-Martin