Re: Poll: RFCs with page numbers (pretty please) ?

[Benjamin Kaduk <[e-mail]>]

On Tue, Oct 27, 2020 at 01:43:42PM -0400, Keith Moore wrote:
> References to RFC text should be in terms of section numbers rather than 
> page numbers.   However, that the current RFC page formatting (for PDF 
> RFCs) isn't well designed for reading on paper, because page footers 
> don't include section numbers.   Without such footers, it's harder to 
> flip pages looking for the desired section.    So I would welcome 
> changes to the RFC footers of paginated RFCs to include section numbers.

That is an interesting idea!  I want to say that I would find it useful,
but I am actually having a hard time imaginging what it would feel like to
have them present -- I might need to see it in action to know how I would
react.

> Section numbers aren't sufficient, however, if one needs to reorder 
> pages from a printed RFC, because a section may span multiple pages.  So 
> there is still a need for page numbers in paginated RFCs.

The act of pagination induces numberings, and not recording those numbers
in-band seems risky, yes.

> Also, not all sections in recent RFCs are numbered, and this is a 
> problem if one wishes to reference an unnumbered section.   I suspect 
> the fix here is to explicitly number/label every section, even 
> Acknowledgments, appendices, etc.
> 
> One problem with having page numbers is that different paginated 
> renderings of the same RFC will likely result in different pagination.   
> But if there's only one paginated rendering of any RFC, as seems to be 
> the case for newer RFCs at least, this is not a problem.
> 
> The currently official "plain text" RFCs are not paginated, but the PDF 

I do want to check in what sense you use the term "official", here -- my
understanding is that the party line is that the XML source is the
authoritative version and that the rendered versions can be regenerated
arbitrarily if there is new tooling deemed to produce "better" output.
(IIRC this was even supposed to happen or did happen for the PDF output,
which due to an error was not actually using the PDF/A stuff that it was
supposed to.) So there can be an "official" plain text version in that it
is on the RFC Editor's website, but it is not authoritative or immutable.

Thanks,

Ben

> versions are paginated with page numbers.     This seems like a good 
> compromise (even if it breaks some old scripts), because Windows systems 
> have historically been too broken to properly print paginated plain text 
> with formfeeds anyway, and because one of the uses of plain text RFCs 
> has always been for automated free-text searching in which page breaks 
> are a nuisance.
> 
> I would like it if HTML versions of RFCs were paginated when printed 
> (with footers containing section numbers and page numbers, and with 
> those page breaks and numbers aligned with other paginated versions of 
> the same RFC.)    But I recognize that this would require significant 
> tooling effort, and could occasionally produce very unsatisfactory 
> results despite that effort.   It seems like the PDF version is 
> sufficient for printing purposes, though it is not as easily found from 
> the HTML version as it might be.   Adding a link to the PDF version at 
> the top of the HTML version would IMO be a good idea.
> 
> Keith
> 
>