Well, I will just point out that the whole discussion was kicked off by a gratuitous defense of the existing format. As for the rejection of Paul's proposal, it is entirely logical to reject a change that fails to go far enough. And your ability to block change in the past is hardly a justification for blocking any changes in the future. If you decide to put it in those terms then the format discussion becomes a debate on the question of whether the IETF is capable of any sort of reform, any sort of growth. If the answer is that it is not then it is a rather sad indictment of the institution. As for 'tendentious', there is nothing particularly 'plain' about being required to have an exact number of lines per page, a number of lines chosen for compatibility with 1960s era dot matrix printers. Teletype format seemed to be considerably less confrontational than the term I have been using in conversation for many years now. On Mon, Mar 15, 2010 at 9:18 PM, Brian E Carpenter <brian.e.carpenter@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On 2010-03-16 05:42, Doug Ewell wrote: > ... >> Note that I am not arguing in favor of plain text as the IETF standard. >> I just want to keep this part of the discussion real. There is no >> requirement anywhere that plain-text files may contain only ASCII >> characters. > > That requirement is explicit for RFCs. > > This was originally in RFC 2223 and its predecessors back to RFC825. > Now it's in > http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc-style-guide/rfc-style > > Since we failed to get consensus even on the minor step proposed > by http://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-hoffman-utf8-rfcs, > I really don't see this conversation converging on a radical > change. > > Also, PHB's list of options is tendentious (by referring > contemptuously to "teleprinter" format) and ambiguous > (since there is no such thing as "the" HTML format for RFCs). > > As an archival format, I am still very happy with ASCII. > Guaranteed layout, trivially searchable. The tools team > HTML markup is nice, but redundant as far as archiving goes. > > Brian (who will once again regret having risen to the bait) > > Brian > _______________________________________________ > Ietf mailing list > Ietf@xxxxxxxx > https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf > -- -- New Website: http://hallambaker.com/ View Quantum of Stupid podcasts, Tuesday and Thursday each week, http://quantumofstupid.com/ _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf