Understood, but since the new canonical form is XML there is a much harder issue.
Regards
Brian
(via tiny screen & keyboard)
Brian
(via tiny screen & keyboard)
On Mon, 2 Dec 2019, 09:48 Scott O. Bradner, <sob@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
the usefulness of a link depends on where the reference is used - I, for example, reference RFCs very
frequently in expert reports in patent cases where everything is still paper-based so the references
need to work when printed on paper
Scott
> On Dec 1, 2019, at 3:45 PM, Brian E Carpenter <brian.e.carpenter@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Scott,
>
> On 02-Dec-19 09:36, Scott O. Bradner wrote:
>>
>>
>>> On Dec 1, 2019, at 3:33 PM, Brian E Carpenter <brian.e.carpenter@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>>
>>> On 02-Dec-19 08:09, John Levine wrote:
>>>> In article <1a1726cf-70a0-019d-1138-c5e22f258d4d@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> you write:
>>>>> I thought the format was a compromise between US Letter format, A4
>>>>> format, and printers.
>>>>
>>>> I thought it was 72 characters because that's how many you got on a
>>>> punch card, leaving 8 for the sequence number.
>>>
>>> Keith is right and it was one of Postel+Reynolds's wiser decisions. The only case where it goes wrong is with software or printers that fail to recognise the FF (form feed) character correctly.
>>>
>>> Phill is correct that it wastes some white space; that's the price of fitting into both paper sizes. When I print drafts, which is rarely, I do it "booklet" style which limits waste paper considerably.
>>>
>>> As we discussed 3 years ago, numbered pagination is useful in a printable format but irrelevant in a screen-only format.
>>
>> except for references - section numbers are frequently far too far apart when you want to point someone to a particular
>> chunk of text
>
> Yes. I sometimes use page numbers for that reason, like https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3056#page-15 (random example with no significance). For new-format HTML, any internal <xref/> should generate a link.
>
> Brian
>
>>
>> Scott
>>
>>>
>>> Can we stop now?
>>>
>>> Brian
>>>>
>>>>> 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 -
>>>>
>>>> I think that if you price all the printers made in the past decade or
>>>> two, you'll find that there are a lot of laser and inkjet printers and
>>>> close to nothing else, certainly nothing restricted to fixed pitch
>>>> text. The only mechanical printers I recall seeing in recent years
>>>> are antique Okidata dot matrix units printing whatever it is they
>>>> print at airport gates.
>>>>
>>>> R's,
>>>> John
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>
>>
