Re: [art] New RFCs text formatting

Julian Reschke <julian.reschke@gmx.de> Fri, 29 November 2019 17:20 UTC

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Subject: Re: [art] New RFCs text formatting
To: Keith Moore <moore@network-heretics.com>, ietf@ietf.org
References: <5A8862BB0F82FECBBF737CC6@JcK-HP5.jck.com> <725e1fd3-5af6-02f1-3a81-763797b8222c@gmx.de> <c558eb17-2395-0727-cb9b-4455a277b29b@network-heretics.com>
From: Julian Reschke <julian.reschke@gmx.de>
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Date: Fri, 29 Nov 2019 18:07:32 +0100
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On 29.11.2019 17:13, Keith Moore wrote:
> On 11/29/19 12:01 AM, Julian Reschke wrote:
>
>> When we had these discussions many years ago, the assumption was that
>> tools that operate on plain text RFCs would strip pagination first (or
>> ignore it altogether) before doing what they need to do next. I would
>> like to understand whether this assumption was wrong, and how *exactly*
>> tools now break.
>
> Yes, the assumption was wrong.

FWIW, I think this is something the RSE should answer.

 From my recollection:

1) We did not require the new implementation to do proper pagination,
because we didn't want people to refer to page numbers in RFCs anymore.
Keeping them would be encouraging that practice, and would be in
conflict with the goal for RFCs to be paginable (is that an English
word?) according to their preference. (Device, paper size, font size etc)

2) We also expected that pagination in the plain text output would
require complexity in the formatter, and we wanted to avoid that. That
point is moot now, as the developer decided to implement it anyway.

So if you actually want a plain text RFC with "proper" pagination, take
the "canonical" XML and run it through xml2rfc with the proper options.

> And it's not possible to enumerate exactly how all of the tools everyone
> is using now break.   But more importantly, that's the wrong question to
> ask.
>
> Many of us realize that when we revise deployed protocols, it's better
> to NOT to make assumptions about which obscure features of deployed
> protocols people depend on.   Instead we try to maintain strict
> compatibility when possible, because we realize that we can't reliably
> know about all of the assumptions that are embedded in existing
> implementations.    Sometimes it's necessary to break strict
> compatibility, but arguments of the form "nobody depends on feature X"
> are always dubious and should be interpreted as red flags.
>
> For better or worse, the legacy text RFC format is a widely deployed
> protocol.   And while most people these days are probably not using this
> feature, there are actually quite a few modern printers out there that
> understand plain text, including form feeds, and also several software
> programs that paginate text files based on form feeds.

For me, printing plain text RFCs never ever made sense, because on DIN
A4, they leave ~25% of the page unused. So please don't assume everybody
uses letter-sized paper.

I also don't quite get why you are mentioning printers at all. Are you
saying you can't print the HTML variant?

> (Expecting everyone out there to use Windows is not only incorrect, it's
> also insulting.)

Not sure what this has to do with the operating system.

In any case, this really sounds like the comeback of a discussion we had
~7 years ago (with probably thousands of emails), leading to the
publication of RFC 6949.

Best regards, Julian