Subject: [Fwd: Re: Last Call: 'Proposed Experiment: Normative Format in Additionto ASCII Text' to Experimental RFC (draft-ash-alt-formats)]

From: Stewart Bryant <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 25 Jun 2006 21:41:31 +0100

As an example,  this .gif extracted from the Y.1711 OAM protocol
would be quite difficult in ASCII. It would take a lot of words
to describe, which many people would then have to transcribe to
some sort of timing diagram - which then may or may not be
correct.

For those that cannot see the GIF it's figure 9

This is a timing diagram which is a problem that few folks have so far 
mentioned.

- Stewart

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From: Lyndon Nerenberg <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 25 Jun 2006 14:05:13 -0700

> some sort of timing diagram - which then may or may not be

However the text in that GIF is unreadable as rendered in my mail  
client (MacOS Mail.app).  When viewed with Preview and the Gimp, the  
background turns gray with white boxes behind the (still unreadable)  
text.

This demonstrates why I was arguing for a vector format, and why I am  
adamantly opposed to a pre-rendered bitmap format, for diagrams.

--lyndon

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From: Iljitsch van Beijnum <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 25 Jun 2006 23:39:30 +0200

On 25-jun-2006, at 22:41, Stewart Bryant wrote:

> would be quite difficult in ASCII.

I'm not surprised, as it contains too much information to be readable  
in a 925 pixel wide GIF. I think this supports Stephen's point that  
if a diagram can't be expressed as ASCII art it's too complex.

On 25-jun-2006, at 23:05, Lyndon Nerenberg wrote:

> client (MacOS Mail.app).  When viewed with Preview and the Gimp,  
> the background turns gray with white boxes behind the (still  
> unreadable) text.

Go blame Apple if they can't even decode a decades old format. (But I  
don't think there is a problem there, the change in background color  
is probably due to a transparent background and the text is rendered  
accurately as it appears in the file: unreadable.)

> This demonstrates why I was arguing for a vector format, and why I  
> am adamantly opposed to a pre-rendered bitmap format, for diagrams.

Vector wouldn't be any better as you still need to render it to a  
bitmap at some point. That works if you have a 2000 pixel wide  
display, but guess what, not everyone does. With GIF we can at least  
all agree that it's unreadable, with vector we'd all have to spend  
extra CPU cycles and then some would still see garbage but others  
would claim everything is fine and we'd have a discussion on  
reasonable screen resolutions on this list every couple of months.  
Let's please leave that particular disaster to the web designers.

Stewart again:

> It would take a lot of words

Human communciation is done with words. Sure, sometimes images help,  
but the only way a diagram can convey a lot of information with  
enough precision is to use a highly structured modelling language,  
which we'd then have to assume every reader of the RFC in question  
understands. Images really aren't as useful as you think.

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From: "Randy Presuhn" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 25 Jun 2006 22:07:43 -0700

Hi -

> From: "Stewart Bryant" <[email-masked]>
> To: <[email-masked]>; <[email-masked]>; <[email-masked]>
> Sent: Sunday, June 25, 2006 1:41 PM
> Subject: [Fwd: Re: Last Call: 'Proposed Experiment: Normative Format in Additionto ASCII Text' to Experimental RFC
(draft-ash-alt-formats)]
> some sort of timing diagram - which then may or may not be
...

I can't make any sense of the graphics, even with my reading glasses.
Could you give a textual account of whatever it is that the diagram
is trying to communicate?

Randy

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From: "David Harrington" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 26 Jun 2006 08:17:48 -0400

So, since most programming languages work in ascii, what you are
saying is that this pretty diagram would be quite difficult to convert
to a lot of words in ascii, which may or may not be correct.
 
So why do we want to make such diagrams the normative specification
rather than using something like pseudocode, which is much easier to
convert to a programming language?
 
And we should consider that if we need to convert from a non-normative
pretty diagram to pseudocode or code, that would presumably be more
easily done by the specification authors who have a profound
understanding of the design, than for a reader not involved in working
on the design.
 
I fully agree that, for the reasons you give, using such pretty
diagrams as normative would generally be a problem.
 
David Harrington
[email-masked]
[email-masked]
[email-masked]

  _____  

From: Stewart Bryant [mailto:[email-masked]] 
Sent: Sunday, June 25, 2006 4:42 PM
To: [email-masked]; [email-masked]; [email-masked]
Subject: [Fwd: Re: Last Call: 'Proposed Experiment: Normative Format
in Additionto ASCII Text' to Experimental RFC (draft-ash-alt-formats)]

- Stewart

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