Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:
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.
That is an author centric view. It is far more important to take a
reader centric view.
Do we have any objective information on what format produced the
clearest information transfer in the reader.
Stewart
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