> Cogent arguments against? Very few people came out and > said that we need nothing beyond ASCII art. If you ask people whether *we* need nothing more than ASCII, I would guess most of us would not claim that, since even if *I* have not had a single case where something beyond ASCII has been preferable, I would not be willing to state what *we* need based only on my experience. Personally, I do not see the point of more complex graphics, and I would prefer not to introduce more complexity into our documents. That does not mean I am saying there can not be a need, so I would not claim that *we* need nothing beyond ASCII. However, I am personally very sceptical to the arguments in favour of more complexity, i.e. I am far from convinced there is a real need here. > It is quite reasonable to last call this draft at this > point. It has been reviewed for ~6 months. This version > posted to the list for comments more than 3 weeks ago, > plenty of time for more comments, but no comments were > posted to the list on this version. Just because people do not comment/contribute one can not expect documents to be progressed. It is the proponent of an idea that has to get support in favour of it, and we have not seen much support for this suggested experiment during previous discussions. >> How will a future implementor know which version is >> normative? At present, there is a simple rule... it >> is always the ASCII version. If this exercise goes >> ahead, some PDF files (which ones?) will be normative, >> and some ASCII files won't. > > I'm sure with all the brain power at hand we can solve > that daunting riddle with another simple rule. I do not think this is about brain power, it is a matter of increasing the formal complexity of our documents. >> the I-D has some misleading examples of bad ASCII art. >> You cannot honestly prove that ASCII art is unusable >> by abusing it. I spent a few minutes cleaning up the >> terrible example in the I-D (Sorry, I am in Washington >> and don't have ready access to it; I will forward it >> when I get back.) > > Yes please send us the competing ASCII diagrams. We > can provide you with even more complex artwork/diagrams > to convert to ASCII art -- this will allow you to > further prove your point. I do not doubt it is possible to come up with artwork that can not be easily captured in ASCII art, but that is rather irrelevant. The relevant question is whether there is meaningful and essential complex artwork needed in our documents that we can not capture in ASCII-art. My personal feeling is that graphics with too much complexity to capture in ASCII-art is trying to describe too much complexity in one picture and should thus be simplified. /L-E _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf