Re: RFC archival format, was: Re: More liberal draft formatting standards required

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On 7/3/09 at 10:16 AM +0200, 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.

And how is this responsive to what I said? Applications of XML (e.g., XHTML, xml2rfc with associated XSL files) provide perfectly good display info that are currently in use by all sorts of display platforms.

The choice of a particular markup language is irrelevant to the overall issue: We need to have text and semantic markup, instead of text with spaces and control characters to do page formatting as our canonical 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.

You bet it goes further: The current format is a horror to anyone who has to "read" the document on anything that does not visually display 80 columns of fixed-width text. Try "reading" the text on a small handheld device. Try doing so with a text-to-speech application. Try magnifying it using apps meant for folks with limited vision. We have the ability to create text in a format that is easily interpreted by all of these devices and presented to the user with no loss of information. Using a page-layout format for our standards when page layout is completely unnecessary is at a minimum "unfriendly" to folks who want to use such devices, and (given that it is unnecessary to use page-layout) it is downright unethical and wrong to make it harder for folks who must use such devices.

Not being able to use characters in documents outside of the US-ASCII set is inconvenient (when they are part of the data stream of a protocol you wish to describe) and unfriendly (when the personal information about contributors cannot be properly provided). I'll leave off unethical there; it's still wrong.

I wonder what people think about the need (or lack of need) to have graphical images.

Images are *way* down the list of needs. Useful in some cases, but never necessary. Getting rid of a page-layout format as our authoritative form is primary. Using characters that do not occur in English is next down the list. Everything else is extra.

pr
--
Pete Resnick <http://www.qualcomm.com/~presnick/>
Qualcomm Incorporated - Direct phone: (858)651-4478, Fax: (858)651-1102
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