Subject: RE: Image attachments to ASCII RFCs (was: Re: Last Call: 'Proposed Experiment: Normative Format in Addition to ASCII Text' to Experimental RFC (draft-ash-alt-formats))

From: "Hallam-Baker, Phillip" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 18 Jun 2006 04:23:47 -0700

> From: Jeffrey Hutzelman [mailto:[email-masked]] 
> 
> ... and, you've completely missed the point.
> 
> Currently, RFC's are published and distributed in a form 
> which is so straightforward that a child could write software 
> to view or produce it.
> 
> Show me a PDF viewer written by a 16-year-old in BASIC, or 
> whatever it is that bored kids write software in these days.

I am more concerned about making a document readable and intelligible by a 16 year old doing a high school class than the somewhat bizare notion of them writing text editors for use by people writing them.

The steps required to format an RFC nicely are far from trivial. 

I have written ps peresentation software, its essentially the same problem as pdf. Its not that much harder to do.

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From: Iljitsch van Beijnum <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 18 Jun 2006 14:31:31 +0200

> I am more concerned about making a document readable and  
> intelligible by a 16 year old doing a high school class than the  
> somewhat bizare notion of them writing text editors for use by  
> people writing them.

It's not _that_ bizarre. Suppose that we decide to allow publishing  
RFCs in PDF only. Suppose that within the next few years some company  
comes up with a replacement for PDF that is better is some important  
regard so that everyone switches to the new format. Suppose that a  
decade later, someone wants to read one of those RFCs that is only  
available in PDF. At that point, it will be extremely hard to do  
that, because all the new software doesn't support PDF anymore, or in  
a way that's too limited to be useful. Using old software that with  
good PDF support isn't an option either, because very little software  
still runs after a decade or so of OS updates. And writing a PDF  
viewer just for this isn't really an option either, while writing a  
viewer or even editor that can handle today's RFC format is.

> The steps required to format an RFC nicely are far from trivial.

It's simple enough, it just takes a lot of effort without good tools.

But I'm still not sure what problem exactly we're trying to solve.