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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