Subject: RE: html formatted drafts

From: "Lars-Erik Jonsson (LU/EAB)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 18 Feb 2005 13:32:57 +0100

> > This is *not* a motion to replace .txt with .html as the preferred 
> > format.
> > It is *not* a motion to make .html required.
> 
> Why not?  I am on record as disapproving of "the IETF’s misguided 
> insistence on publishing key documents in a format (66-line 80-column 
> ASCII) that is outdated, unusable, and offensive. 

Compared to all other formats I've seen being used by other SDO's, I
find the RFC ASCII format to be completely outstanding. It is simple,
consistent and clear. It can be easily opened on any platform without
special tools, and it makes documents minimal in size, which is still
an important issue when handling huge amounts of documents.

If one can not open and print an RFC properly, I can not see how any
other format would help, as the RFC format is the most portable and
general format I can imagine. Sometimes people fail to properly
format their ID's (e.g. with missing page breakes, too long lines, too
many lines per page, etc), but if one really reads the clear guidelines
for how to format an ID, that should not be an issue.

I can not see how a different format could give us better standards,
to better serve the Internet. Anyway, I concur with Steve, we have had
this discussion regularily and the outcome has always been the same.

/Lars-Erik

---

From: Stewart Bryant <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 18 Feb 2005 13:02:19 +0000

> this discussion regularily and the outcome has always been the same.

I don't much care how we do the text, but being a picture person
rather than a language person, I really do wish we could agree on
something better than ASCII art for the normative diagrams.

Stewart