Subject: A draft for WEIRD discussion...

From: Burke Chris-CCB007 <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 26 Feb 1999 16:50:25 -0600

Hi! For those of you getting this through [email-masked], welcome to the
Web Evangelism of Internet-Related Developments (WEIRD) mailing list.

I'll be hosting the WEIRD BOF at Minneapolis. My name is Chris Burke, and I
help manage Motorola's participation in internet and application standards
bodies from my office in sunny Seattle, WA.

One of our goals at the WEIRD BOF will be to decide whether to charter a
working group. My interest in this working group is to make information
about the IETF and the internet more accessible to typical, non-technical
internet users. I believe that we need to move IETF content onto the Web,
and use real line drawings and graphics, to reach this audience. For me, the
open issues on the charter are about what content we use as a starting
point. Maybe you have a different idea about the charter, and I'd like to
hear it at the BOF to see if we can find some common ground.

To get some advance discussion going, I wrote this draft. I'd like to revise
this based on your input - especially in the requirements section - and make
it an official "working group draft" once the group charters. So, without
further ado, here's <draft-burke-realusers-00.txt>, "Real Users Don't Read
RFCs".

Have a great weekend!

Chris Burke

 <<draft-burke-realusers-00.txt>>

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From: Michael Sondow <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 01 Mar 1999 11:21:38 +0800

Burke Chris-CCB007 wrote:

>  I believe that we need to move IETF content onto the Web,
> and use real line drawings and graphics, to reach this audience.

I agree wholeheartedly with this, especially the use of drawings and graphics.

The following, from your draft, are especially appropriate, IMO.

      "It can now be argued that the text-only RFC format is, itself,
      a source of cultural bias in the dissemination of information about the
      internet: a cultural bias toward people who know what a PDP-11 is.
      While not in possession of hard data, the author argues that relatively
      few who today consider themselves internet users have ever used a "text
      editor" or have access to a "text printer". The abundance of FAQs
      [MARSHALL99] [SQUARE96] written to explain the emoticons :-) used in
      e-mail illustrate the difficulty that end-users have with use of
      typewriter graphics to convey "images". The ability to render a 256
      color bitmap is as pervasive on today's computers as was the ability to
      render text on a VT100 when current RFC rules were drafted."

      "The author believes that a restricted subset of HTML, including support
for bit-mapped
      graphics images, is a good starting point."

This sounds about right. Certainly bit-mapped images are now universal.

OTOH,  I think the matter of using links in RFCs in HTML needs to be very
carefully considered.

The "requirements" section of your draft seems quite adequate. Can't think of a
thing to add, except possibly a requirement relating to the editors, for
example that the format(s) employed be standardized and that they be accessible
to all members of the working groups concerned with editing them.