Dave I agree that we are thinking as "content creators", and that is the problem. The requirement is not that we will be able to write a new document in 50 years in the same format. The requirement is that we should be able to read the documents written 50 years before. The problem about ASCII art is not simply the monospacing. The main problem is the line wrapping. I have tried many times to look at ASCII art on iPhones, iPods, and even small pads. Once you zoom down sufficiently to get the lines not to break, the characters are no longer readable. For a screen size of about 60 mm, 80 character lines means that the characters are only 0.75mm in width. Even assuming a "short" figure that could be viewed rotated (width 110 mm) each character width would be only slightly more than the 1 mm needed for viewing, and less than the 1.5 mm needed for actual reading. Put in another way, high-end cellphone screens presently have 640 pixel widths. For 80 character layouts, this translates to 8 pixels per character plus inter-character spacing, or about 6 pixel character widths. Even were they visible (and each pixel is less than 1/10 of a mm!) this would mean very low quality fonts - 5*7 was the lowest quality used by old dot-matrix printers. And modern software is not optimized for readability at that font resolution. So, if we expect people to be able to read our documents in 5 years, let alone 50, we need to stop using ASCII art. Y(J)S -----Original Message----- From: ietf-bounces@xxxxxxxx [mailto:ietf-bounces@xxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Dave Aronson Sent: Sunday, November 27, 2011 00:10 To: IETF Discussion Subject: Re: discouraged by .docx was Re: Plagued by PPTX again On Sat, Nov 26, 2011 at 15:52, Yaakov Stein <yaakov_s@xxxxxxx> wrote: > ASCII is already unreadable on many popular devices Oh? For what reason? Sorry, I'm still using an incredibly stupid phone, so I may be behind the curve on such changes. As far as I've seen in my limited exposure, any difficulty is usually because it's often not linewrapped well (or at all), forcing a lot of horizontal scrolling, especially after being forced to be big enough to be legible on tiny screens not held right up to the face. That's rather inconvenient, but still a far cry from "unreadable" -- plus it's a problem with the reader program (being too "featureless" to rewrap the text), not anything inherent in the format. ASCII *artwork*, yes, that often gets ruined by the refusal of many programs to allow the user to display content in a monospaced font. But that's not because it's in plain ASCII; you could say the same thing of a Word or PDF document that incorporates "ASCII" art. > I am referring to the fact that more and more people are reading > documents on cell-phones and other small devices. > According to analysts, this will be the most popular platform for reading > material from the Internet within a few years. But among what audience? End-users at large, yes, I can certainly believe that. But techies, especially of sufficient caliber to even *want* to read the IETF's output, let alone participate in creating it? Very doubtful. I don't think we'll be giving up our laptops, never mind large monitors, any time soon. Phones and tablets are for content *consumption*. We are content *creators*, be it programs, documents, or whatever. That's an entirely different set of hardware requirements. When was the last time you saw a program or document or anything else of significant size, written using a phone, or even a tablet? -Dave _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf