----- Original Message ----- From: "John Levine" <johnl@xxxxxxxxx> To: <ietf@xxxxxxxx> Cc: <daedulus@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Friday, March 01, 2013 7:44 PM > >There should be an immutable requirement that any alternative format > >MUST NOT increase the size by more than a factor of two compared to > >ASCII text. > > So you're saying you're unalterably opposed to the RFC editor providing > PDF, HTML, epub, mobipocket, and every other format that people actually > use on modern computers, as well as anything that includes reasonably > legible images? I am opposed to the careless, thoughtless use of these formats which causes a massive increase in the resources needed to do anything with them; I quoted a 16-fold increase in one that came from another SDO but I have seen 50-fold increases in ones from individuals. Look under the covers and the markup being used in a way that seems designed to maximise resource usage. With *ML, there may be tens of kilobytes of css which seems to a logical 'or' of anything used anytime in an organisation; or code translation tables that make UCS seem small; or applying markup that is no different to the default to each and every paragraph such as BORDER-RIGHT: medium none; BORDER-TOP: medium none; VERTICAL-ALIGN: middle; BORDER-LEFT: medium none; CURSOR: pointer; COLOR: #FFFFFF; BORDER-BOTTOM: medium none; FONT-SIZE: 12px; FONT-FAMILY: Arial Unicode MS, san-serif (The worst offenders seem to documents that have been converted from MS-Word into something else). Look at RFC and the XML that goes into it, and a ratio of two to one, input to output text, is generous on any document of reasonable size. It is harder to look inside a pdf and see why the same document can be 20kbyte or 100kbyte but I would appeark that a similar consideration applies. Impose no limit and you could get a 16-fold increase in the resources needed. Great for mobile phone operators and hardware manufacturers, bad news for those who want to progress the work of the IETF. Tom Petch > If that's not what you mean, what DO you mean? We all seem to agree > that we want to continue to provide the traditional line printer image > format, but on today's Internet where 20Mb/sec cable modems aren't > particularly fast, it's silly to demand that documents be sized for > floppy disks. > > R's, > John >