Re: Baby Steps (was RE: Alternative formats for IDs)

[Stewart Bryant <stbryant@xxxxxxxxx>]

John C Klensin wrote:

--On Thursday, 05 January, 2006 08:25 -0600 "Ash, Gerald R
\\(Jerry\\)" <gash@xxxxxxx> wrote:

  

Happy New Year to all!

Many thanks to Yaakov for his excellent handling of the list
discussion.  I'm not very surprised with the way it has gone.
Déjà vu all over again :-)

The challenge is to focus the discussion to try to reach
consensus on moving forward with a process change, i.e., we
need to take baby steps to make progress.

I'd suggest we try to reach consensus first on the following:
Alternative format(s) for IDs, in addition to ASCII text,
should be allowed.  

One requirement/motivation for this change (as set forth in
the ID) is to be able to include drawings and diagrams with
something much more flexible than ASCII art.

Based on the prior discussion of 'ASCII art', and the current
discussion, I see few people arguing that ASCII text is all we
need and that no other formats should ever be allowed.
    

Even those of us who are strongly supportive of ASCII as our
primary base format and those who believe that the effort needed
to simplify illustrations and diagrams sufficiently that they
can be accurately represented in ASCII artwork is helpful in
forcing clarity are reluctant to say "never".

  

Let's set aside for now which format(s), and take that as a
later step if we can take this first step.
    

Jerry, one of the nice things about baby steps is that you
sometimes discover that the baby learned to take the steps
without any instruction.

Unless the IESG has changed the rules while I was not looking,
it has been permitted to post I-Ds in PDF in addition to ASCII
for some years. 

BUT the pdf is not allowed to be normative. Changing that rule alone would
be sufficient to allow modern graphics to be called up in normative texts.

I find it interesting that it has not been taken
advantage of more often (and, for the record, I'm one of those
who has taken advantage of it).  When it has been done for
artwork purposes, the artwork in the ASCII version has sometimes
been pretty rudimentary.   In practice, whether it is "good
enough" has been made on a case by case basis by WG Chairs and
WGs or, for non-WG documents, by whether or not the relevant
people are willing to read and consider those documents.
  

Please clarify this. Are you saying that if the WG/WGchairs/ADs agree that the non-ASCII
version should be the normative version (because they want the better artwork), then  that's
OK? I thought  I asked this a long time ago and was told no.
 

Similarly, when PDF has been posted in order to exhibit
non-ASCII characters, it has proven helpful to have Unicode
character offsets (i.e., U+nnnn representations)  in both the
ASCII and PDF forms to ensure complete precision even though the
character-glyphs themselves appear only in the PDF form.  

So, consider the first baby step to have been taken: nothing
prevents you from posting an I-D in both ASCII and PDF today,
and the relevant sub-community will sort out, on a case by case
basis, whether the ASCII is good enough.   

...and if it's not the pdf version of the text including graphics will become the RFC?

- Stewart

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