Hi, First, my excuses to Martin for the cheap shot below. But I really couldn't help myself, as hist posting illustrates the power of one of the potential alternatives to ASCII (as a presentation format for drafts and RFCs) so well... On 2010-03-12 01:11 Martin Rex said the following: > Actually, the page breaks _are_ useful. Like when referencing specific > parts/paragraph in a document with an URL in a long section, e.g. > http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5246#page-36 > which contains the message flow of a full TLS handshake. > And that message flow is just perfect in ASCII arts. <cheap_shot> I find it extremely suggestive that to make his point (in defence of the ASCII format), the author of the quoted message snippet above sent a pointer to a HTML-converted version of an RFC, which includes anchors which makes it possible to refer to individual pages (and sections)... </cheap_shot> I really think that we should decide to move beyond the current pure-ASCII presentation format, whether it be a constrained HTML or PDF-A (which are the primary serious contenders as alternatives to pure ASCII as presentation format that I see). Note that I'm not specifying how to constrain the presentation-format HTML here, only that we'd probably want a presentation format which is more constrained than just 'any' HTML if we choose HTML as the vehicle for the presentation of drafts and RFCs. Focusing on the constrained HTML alternative, it could give us the richness of unicode and all the abilities of HTML which we'd want to use, including the ability to add internal and external links at the appropriate places in a document. Constraining it could protect us against undesirable excesses and variations. I believe a significant number of us are currently using the HTMLized versions (from http://tools.ietf.org/html/) of drafts and RFCs as the preferred reading format, because of the links it provides; if we were to move to a (constrained) HTML format as the standard presentation format for drafts and RFCs we could add other goodness like re-flowable paragraphs which would make the documents more accessible on small-screen devices and for those who prefer larger font size for readability. A move to a richer standardised presentation format than ASCII would only be sensible if the appropriate tools were available for generation of that format; but we really need to decide that we want to move forward with this first; otherwise we won't have many who are willing to sit down and contribute time and energy on the necessary tools. Best regards, Henrik _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf