On 29.11.2019 17:13, Keith Moore wrote:
On 11/29/19 12:01 AM, Julian Reschke wrote:
When we had these discussions many years ago, the assumption was that
tools that operate on plain text RFCs would strip pagination first (or
ignore it altogether) before doing what they need to do next. I would
like to understand whether this assumption was wrong, and how *exactly*
tools now break.
Yes, the assumption was wrong.
FWIW, I think this is something the RSE should answer.
From my recollection:
1) We did not require the new implementation to do proper pagination,
because we didn't want people to refer to page numbers in RFCs anymore.
Keeping them would be encouraging that practice, and would be in
conflict with the goal for RFCs to be paginable (is that an English
word?) according to their preference. (Device, paper size, font size etc)
2) We also expected that pagination in the plain text output would
require complexity in the formatter, and we wanted to avoid that. That
point is moot now, as the developer decided to implement it anyway.
So if you actually want a plain text RFC with "proper" pagination, take
the "canonical" XML and run it through xml2rfc with the proper options.
And it's not possible to enumerate exactly how all of the tools everyone
is using now break. But more importantly, that's the wrong question to
ask.
Many of us realize that when we revise deployed protocols, it's better
to NOT to make assumptions about which obscure features of deployed
protocols people depend on. Instead we try to maintain strict
compatibility when possible, because we realize that we can't reliably
know about all of the assumptions that are embedded in existing
implementations. Sometimes it's necessary to break strict
compatibility, but arguments of the form "nobody depends on feature X"
are always dubious and should be interpreted as red flags.
For better or worse, the legacy text RFC format is a widely deployed
protocol. And while most people these days are probably not using this
feature, there are actually quite a few modern printers out there that
understand plain text, including form feeds, and also several software
programs that paginate text files based on form feeds.
For me, printing plain text RFCs never ever made sense, because on DIN
A4, they leave ~25% of the page unused. So please don't assume everybody
uses letter-sized paper.
I also don't quite get why you are mentioning printers at all. Are you
saying you can't print the HTML variant?
(Expecting everyone out there to use Windows is not only incorrect, it's
also insulting.)
Not sure what this has to do with the operating system.
In any case, this really sounds like the comeback of a discussion we had
~7 years ago (with probably thousands of emails), leading to the
publication of RFC 6949.
Best regards, Julian
