If you add up the numbers, about a quarter of a million seriously Internet-capable mobile devices are being sold every day between iPhone, Android, and Blackberry. I'd like to illustrate the experience with some screenshots from such a device - this happens to be a Nexus One Android, which is a typical example of such a thing, roughly comparable in display capabilities to current iPhones. I'm told that Blackberries are a little behind but catching up. Just suppose, for example, that I wanted to look up the link relationships defined in RFC4287. Taking the direct path, if I type "rfc4287" into google and take the first hit, I get to http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4287. After I page through several screens of line breakage to get to the TOC, I see http://www.tbray.org/reflowable/tvh4.jpg So, I need to page through 21 80-column 66-line pages; tedious, and when I was doing this today I went past it by accident, got totally lost. Anyhow, eventually I got to this discussion of the link relationships: Ugly, and I have to work around the page headers: http://www.tbray.org/reflowable/tvh5.jpg Finally, I get to the list of link relationships: http://www.tbray.org/reflowable/tvh6.jpg Now, I happen to know where to find a sensible minimal-HTML version; a couple of flicks of the screen get me to the TOC: http://www.tbray.org/reflowable/tvh1.jpg I tap directly on the link for section 4.2.7 which gets me this: http://www.tbray.org/reflowable/tvh2.jpg Here's list of relationships: http://www.tbray.org/reflowable/tvh3.jpg Yeah, it's not perfect, I have to do a bit of side-scrolling here and there; turning the phone sideways is often helpful. But anyhow, I got what I wanted in a highly readable format in a small number of seconds with a couple of taps and swipes. The browsers are getting better all the time. When I raised this as a use case, the defenders of the status quo essentially suggested that I shouldn't want to use IETF specifications this way. I do. The current format was designed to work well on paper and VT100s. -Tim _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
