On 3 jul 2009, at 0:35, Pete Resnick wrote:
A much better solution would be HTML, if it's sufficiently constrained.
Or, gee, we could generalize to a very constrained XML format
XML isn't a display format.
As Dave put it, the current RFC format is "unfriendly, unnecessary, possibly unethical and just plain wrong." I'd remove the "possibly."
Please elaborate; this statement goes far beyond the inconvenience of having fixed line and page breaks and the lack of non-7-bit-ASCII characters.
I wonder what people think about the need (or lack of need) to have graphical images. Having written a book or two, I can tell you that getting text right is hard, but this pales in comparison to the difficulty of getting images right. Most people, including myself, don't have the skills to create decent artwork. The formats are infinitely less open (in a variety of senses), so modifying someone else's images is extremely difficult unless you happen to use the same tools or go to the lowest common denominator = bitmaps. And images are of course impossible to use on text-only terminals. On constrained devices they're hard to work with because the text doesn't scale.
So I think a good argument could be made that in general, RFCs shouldn't have images.
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