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

[Keith Moore <[e-mail]>]

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.

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.

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 
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