Subject: RE: HTML better for small PDAs

From: "Christian Huitema" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 23 Feb 2001 09:44:00 -0800

The way I think about it, the current "ascii" rule makes it hard for the
writer, moderately easy for the reader, and very easy for the archivist.
It is hard for the writer now, because we are mostly using wysiwig tools
that don't produce ascii very naturally. OTOH, it is not too hard -- for
example, the extra cost of postprocessing a Microsoft Words formatted
document to an internet-draft format is at most a couple of minutes,
which seems a reasonable investment when you write for the posterity. As
a matter of fact, it does not take longer than the nroff postprocessing
that we used when nroff was the norm.

Ascii text is moderately easy for the reader. Let's face it, the 72
character per line format has its roots in a time of 24x80 character
screens, which itself had its root in the generic 80 columns punch card.
That is fine when a screen is large enough to display a full line of
text, but that is definitely suboptimal on small screens. A marked-up
presentation would allow for better rendition on  small PDA screens, and
would also allow for a better support of those of us who have a poor
eyesight. OTOH, the RFC format is very regular, with fixed size pages,
regular indentation, etc. Many people have already written filters that
convert this format into their preferred mark-up language, which is a
reasonable compromise for viewers.

We should note that the "ease of view" argument is an argument for
mark-up languages, not for fancy page formatting languages such as
Adobe's PDF: if you cannot reformat the page on display, there is no
particular benefit for the owners of small screens or weak eyes. But the
very benefits that make make marked-up presentation tempting also carry
a big risk in a standard world: if the documents you view depend on how
you view them, there is a risk that conficting view generate conficting
interpretation. That risk is well known in international circles, when
for example the translation of various UN resolutions can carry slightly
different meanings in different languages. If we want standards, we want
a simple reference. Printing an ascii text with a fixed font and a fixed
page set-up gives us that.

In my opinion, the hardship imposed on the authors and on the present
readers is more than compensated by the ease of archival of the text
format, the ease of read by future readers, and the adaptation to the
job at hand, publishing standards. Mark-up languages have evolved in
time, from nroff to tex and latex, from wordperfect to office XP, from
sgml to html and xml. Markup languages tend to be highly parametrized,
with various nroff or tex macros, various word templates, various html
extensions and xml dtds. The macros tend to have an even shorter
lifespan that the languages themselves, which make them even poorer
candidates for an archival function. Frankly, the energy spent every
fice years in questioning the ascii format would be better spent in
writing transition tools...

-- Christian Huitema

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 23 Feb 2001 14:58:04 -0500

On Fri, 23 Feb 2001 13:22:15 EST, Jeremy Foshee said:
> Valdis wrote:
> >Now, who was saying that you didn't need a DTD to understand the XML? ;)
> 
> You don't. XML has the ability to stand on it's own if you desire.

Umm.. without a DTD, how do you interpret all the markup that was the POINT
of using XML?  Yes, a XML document without the DTD can be syntax-checked, but
let's think for a moment - if you don't have the (hypothetical) rfc2119 DTD,
what is the *semantics* of:

<point>Implementors of Turbo-Foobar <should>support the XYZ extension</should>
</point>

Before you say "but we all know what 'should' means", consider that we felt
it necessary to publish RFC2119.

-- 
				Valdis Kletnieks
				Operating Systems Analyst
				Virginia Tech

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 26 Feb 2001 09:51:34 -0000

Vladis,

You wrote:

Actually, it *is* a valid argument - consider that hieroglyphs were
unreadable until they found the Rosetta Stone.  The media lasted, but the
ability to parse didn't.

ASCII has proven to be understandable 40 years after being written.
XML has proven to be understandable 5 years after being written.
Hieroglyphs have proven to be recognizable but not understandable 2000 years
after being written (2000 years placing it just BEFORE the Rosetta Stone
was found)....

--------------------------

ASCII is NOT understandable by people who can't read and/or speak languages
which use the Latin alphabet. It is not understandable by them now, and it
was not understandable 40 years ago.

So, I agree with you about the ability to parse and understand.  But ASCII
doesn't support that ability for most people in the world.

Hieroglyphs were perfectly understandable for the whole of their history -
to an ancient Egyptian. Just like ASCII is perfectly understandable to
someone who understands ASCII [ an ancient IETFer ?   8o)  ]. Neither of
these facts helps the population of today's world to the extent that they
COULD be helped by more suitable formats.  

ANY storage format relies on its encoding being translated / interpreted
before they can be understood. I suspect that none of us would be reading
ASCII, if we did not have PCs to do this for us.  What we should be pushing
for is a format which can be translated / interpreted into as many languages
as possible, so as not to disadvantage world citizens who can not deal with
ASCII.

Regards,

Graham Travers

* - Email:  [email-masked]

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	[email-masked] [SMTP:[email-masked]]
> Sent:	Friday, February 23, 2001 5:28 PM
> To:	[email-masked]
> Cc:	[email-masked]; [email-masked]
> Subject:	Re: HTML better for small PDAs 
> 
>  << File: SMIME.txt >>

---

From: "Christian Huitema" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 26 Feb 2001 08:47:25 -0800

> ASCII is NOT understandable by people who can't read and/or 
> speak languages which use the Latin alphabet. It is not 
> understandable by them now, and it was not understandable 40 
> years ago.

Uh? This is an argument against the english language, not an argument
againt the character set. If someone does not speak english, it matters
very little whether the document is presented as 55x72 fixed typeset
pages, Postscript, HTML, or XML. Indeed, we could also debate whether
the documents should be made available in other languages than english,
but the experience of organizations who do that , such as the UN, the
EU, and to some degree the ITU, teaches us that quite a few lessons.
First, this is a very expensive proposition; the IETF does not quite
have the resource of maintaining a corps of interpreters. Second,
translation is time consuming, and can be the cause of many publication
delays, which can be used in standard-process games. Third, as
translation is never a perfect bijection, there is a non-zero risk of
conflicting interpretations of the various language texts, and thus lack
of interoperability.

This is not to say that we should make efforts to have the IETF
protocols documented in many languages, for people to understand. But I
would rather draw a sharp separation between the reference text, for
which a single language and a spartan presentation are adequate, and the
educational material, which ought to be available in many languages,
forms and shapes.

-- Christian Huitema

---

From: Vernon Schryver <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 26 Feb 2001 16:20:23 -0700 (MST)

> From: Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>

> ...
>   I'm not certain that this would be the case for a sufficiently constrained
> DTD. Something at the level of complexity of the MAN nroff macros in
> formatting ability.

MAN nroff would be overkill, as demonstrated by the restricted nroff
that the RFC editor accepts (or used to accept) for I-D's.

And apparently generated from pure ASCII submissions.

Vernon Schryver    [email-masked]

---

From: "Rosen, Brian" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 Feb 2001 14:21:17 -0500

Interestingly, 8.5 x 11 comes about because of writing, not reading.

Books are smaller than 8.5 x 11.  Tablets are 8.5 x 11, and typewriters 
copied that.  Laser printers copied typewriters.  Stenographers used smaller

tablets because they had to hold them in their hands rather than put them on
a desk.  Writing on a PDA is similar.

Reading is another story.  Turns out that line width is not all that 
important. No book has 72 characters per line, and no book has fixed pitch 
fonts.  All of that is a technology crutch, and horrible for readability.  
People who claim 72 character fixed pitch lines is for readers are smokin 
something funny.  It's left-over Hollerith card, with no basis in human
value.

Display technology has a really annoying reality - people always want more
resolution, but they pay close to nothing for it.  A great many companies
have
imploded because they believed people will pay a significant premium for a
better display (I imploded one or two myself, including a 300 dpi CRT
display
in '85). Just isn't so.

Display technology also is not subject to Moore's law - it's currently much,
much slower, and about 90% of the innovations have not turned into
commercial
realities.  Take every announcement of new display technology with a very
large dose of skepticism.

The biggest problem with PDAs today is contrast ratio, and that is fixable 
with more brightness, but has the problem of eating batteries.  You will 
probably see high contrast ratio, probably color, PDAs commonplace soon. 
They will increase resolution maybe 5% per year on average, but don't hold 
your breath on much more than that.  I can see displays that unfold once, 
like a book, but the idea that to read something you will unfold, and
unfold, 
and unfold doesn't seem like it will get very far.

If you want something to be readable, use a proportional font, don't worry
too much about line width, and increase your contrast ratio.

With respect to this discussion, it's not ASCII that's the problem, it's
the font and the fixed line width.  However, if we fix that, then a we
	Get to fix several less important issues without any additional 
      complexity
		                but
	We get all the problems of universiality, and archival storage

The solution has been obvious, but it has a cost we haven't figured out how
to pay.  The solution is to separate the functions of "source", "display" 
and "archive".  Source in XML, display in a variety of formats, including 
fixed width, fixed pitch ASCII.  Archive both the XML source and the ASCII.

The cost is that to be useful, we need tools to produce nroff markup from
XML source, because no one is ready to accept RFCs that can't be displayed
the way we display them now, and archive them the way we archive now.
Marshall's excellent work is fine for I-Ds, but it isn't enough for RFCs.
We need to produce pleasing ASCII, and the tool we use for that is nroff.
The tool and the DTD has to allow the overworked, and under appreciated
RFC editor staff to produce at least the same quality of ASCII output as
they do now, with no more than the current level of effort.  New tools mean
training, and that is another part of the cost.

We also have to create an XML archive from the current archive. 

Harald's suggestion of allowing ASCII and one other file to be archived for
I-Ds is a very reasonable, and very useful step.  He has a really good
point;
if we show that we will use another format, then we can move forward.
As soon as someone puts up a pleasing HTML render for the XML source,
that will be my preferred way to view I-Ds.  The indexing, reference,
and other side effects will also be welcome.

Brian

> From: Bora Akyol [mailto:[email-masked]]
> Sent: Monday, February 26, 2001 10:27 PM
> To: Lyndon Nerenberg
> Cc: Marshall T. Rose; [email-masked]
> I guess I have to hold up this "letter" sized paper display and try to
> write on it at the same time.
> 
> I'll believe it when I see it. I saw the article on this 
> topic in MIT Tech
> review a few months ago, but they were saying that this technology is
> years ahead. In the meantime, I will keep on using my Pilot 
> (oops Palm).
> 
> Bora
> 
> 
> On Mon, 26 Feb 2001, Lyndon Nerenberg wrote:
> 
> > > the hardware problem is the eyes and the hands. i use a 
> pda because i can
> > > put it in my hip pocket. that's just not going to happen 
> with a screen that
> > > half-size or full-size.
> > 
> > You're thinking too traditionally. Displays will decouple from the
> > processor (think Bluetooth). The "CPU" will holster on your belt,
> > and the A4 sized thin-film display will fold up to fit in 
> your pocket.
> > And pixel density will increase to approach that of paper. 
> (At 300 DPI
> > you can shrink the font enough to get the better part of a 
> 60x72 character
> > page onto even todays sized PDA displays if you display in 
> landscape.)
> > 
> > Or maybe the technology will be something else. The point is that
> > the display technology _will_ be there, and it will be there soon.
> > (Soon enough that current PDA limitations aren't a good enough
> > justification - IMO - for the sort of changes we're talking about
> > making.)
> > 
> > --lyndon
> > 
> 
> -
> This message was passed through [email-masked], which
> is a sublist of [email-masked]. Not all messages are passed.
> Decisions on what to pass are made solely by Harald Alvestrand.
>