At 9:54 AM +0100 11/21/05, Julien.Maisonneuve@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
The IETF is probably the ONLY meaningful organisation in the world that insists on using ascii-only specifications. Any rationalization of that practise should try to explain why we are so exceptional before embarking on specious arguments on the relative merits of writing specs in morse code to improve design simplicity.
We are so exceptional because all of our old standards can be implemented from as-is, without any possibly-lossy conversion. Standards organizations that used, for example, Microsoft Word version 2 for the PC, as their base document format, have had to convert their documents multiple times for current users to be able to read them. That conversion is sometime clean; often, it involves (lossy) humans reformatting text and pictures.
As others have pointed out on this thread, the ASCII art in IETF specs is (or should be) optional to implementers. The corollary is: why bother to go to a format that uses something other than ASCII art, if it is an optional component? Other than prettiness, what is the advantage for our intended audience of protocol developers?
This is not to say that all RFCs do just fine with ASCII art. We have non-standards documents, which we want the outside world to read, that look silly with the current formatting restrictions. We live with projecting that visual clumsiness, as geeks often do.
--Paul Hoffman, Director --VPN Consortium _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf