Re: [art] New RFCs text formatting

Keith Moore <moore@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> · Sun, 1 Dec 2019 13:37:13 -0500



    On 11/30/19 10:59 PM, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:

    
          On Sat, Nov
            30, 2019 at 10:12 PM Joel Halpern Direct <jmh.direct@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
            wrote:

          
          That (the suggestions
            that RFC-interest is the wrong place to judge such 

            things) may be, which is why I listed alternatives.  But
            just saying 

            that two people liked the idea, and no one screamed, in one
            day, is 

            clearly NOT enough to change the default.
          

          Quite. The
            botched pagination of the old plaintext format was one of
            the main reasons I hated it. The parochial US-centric design
            ensures that it only works reliably on US paper which is
            only used in North America.
        
      
    I thought the format was a compromise between US Letter format,
      A4 format, and printers.   The horizontal line length was short
      enough for A4 format.   The number of lines per page was short
      enough for Letter format.   And even those printers capable of
      centering a text image on a page, didn't do so by default.  Some
      printers could print 66 lines on a page, but some could only print
      60 or even 58.  A lot of printers were set so that the start of a
      page (after receiving a form feed or page advance button press)
      was some distance down from the perforation or top of the actual
      page, so that there would be some margin at the top (sometimes
      used for binding) and the printed text wouldn't creep to overlap
      the perforations on continuous-feed paper.  

    
    (In hindsight maybe the line lengths should have been even
      shorter so that RFCs would look equally ugly when printed in
      either Letter or A4 format, but nothing's perfect.)

    
    In some ways it's still a better format than anything else,
      including HTML and PDF. 

    
    What would be parochial would be to assume that nobody in the
      world needs to print RFCs using mechanical printers any more -
      that everyone in the world should have laser printers, ample power
      for their fusers, and a generous supply of suitable paper and
      toner - or for that matter that everyone in the world should have
      multiple displays so they can read RFCs on one screen while
      writing code or other specifications on another one.   Yes, the
      plain text RFC format is a low-tech format intended for low-tech
      devices.   That's a feature, not a bug.

    
    Keith

    
    p.s. Some may not be aware, and some may have forgotten, that I
      was the first to set up an "RFCs in PDF" page (I believe there was
      also an "I-Ds in PDF" page) so that those readers who were forced
      to use Windows would still have a way to print out RFCs with
      appropriate pagination.   It seemed like overkill to use PDF for
      that, but it wasn't too hard to implement and it was fit for
      purpose.  I'm all about making RFCs accessible (yes, even for
      Windows users :) but not about breaking things that work.