Re: [apps-discuss] On citations in general

[Nico Williams <[e-mail]>]

On Wed, Apr 25, 2012 at 1:09 PM, Blaine Cook <[e-mail]> wrote:
> Why not just use links as Tim suggests with descriptive text in the content
> of the anchor? I don't see how offline reading is a blocker.

That's fine for HTML rendering, not so much for .txt rendering.
Though maybe it's time to obsolete .txt, if we won't allow UTF-8 in
.txt ever anyways in case -gasp!- someone's terminal displays garbage
(because you know that *never* happens and never possibly could as
long as we refrain from putting UTF-8 in RFCs).  (Hey, this sarcasm
thing is pretty fun!)

Though personally, I *like* .txt.  For one I get to apply the find |
xargs egrep pattern, and I really like being able to use advanced
regular expressions like that.  I can also apply various text indexing
tools; I've been thinking that a SQLite3 FTS RFC and I-D DB toolset
would be handy.  Web search engines aren't anywhere near as powerful
for searching such a small document set -- web search engines are
great for searching data/doc sets I could *never* store copies of
locally.  Also, less(1) is fantastic for reading RFCs and has much
faster startup/load times than any browser out there.  Sometimes less,
is more, and spartan .txt (with UTF-8 for bleep's sakes) is fabulous.
I suppose what I need is elinks(1) with regexp support, and to keep
rendered (as .txt) forms around for find | xargs egrep searching (or
else local web search indexes).  But, really, from a simplicity point
of view, .txt is just hard to beat.

Nico
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