Re: FIXED: Poll: RFCs with page numbers (pretty please) ? (was: Re: John/rsoc: Re: Page numbers in RFCs questions / preferences)

["Andrew G. Malis" <[e-mail]>]

Jim,

Open any recent HTML RFC (such as
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8905.html) and take a look at the frame
to the right of the text (on a phone browser, the TOC is a button at the
top of the screen).

Cheers,
Andy


On Tue, Oct 27, 2020 at 7:57 PM Jim Fenton <[e-mail]> wrote:

> [Yikes, this discussion is getting crossposted everywhere, it seems.
> I’ll keep it brief]
>
> On 27 Oct 2020, at 16:36, David Noveck wrote:
>
> > The issue comes up with PDF files.  Currently, you get page numbers
> > together with a TOC that has no page numbers.  I'm OK with a no-TXT
> > option
> > but I have a problem with a not-usefully-printable option for RFCs.
>
> When RFC 8689 was about to be published about a year ago, I had a chat
> with the staff at the RFC Editor table in Singapore about this. It
> seemed a little strange to have a table of contents without page
> numbers, but if some people are reading HTML versions, PDF versions, and
> TXT versions, the pagination is different anyway (and nonexistent for
> HTML) so trying to reference something by page number is problematic.
> References should be to section numbers, and if sections are so big that
> it’s hard to find some text there, the author should really think
> about structuring the document with smaller subsections.
>
> What does seem strange (and maybe it has changed in the past year) is
> that the plain text and PDF versions have tables of contents, and the
> html version does not. I would like for the html version to have a table
> of contents with links to anchors for each section.
>
> -Jim
>
> > On Tue, Oct 27, 2020, 6:51 PM Phillip Hallam-Baker
> > <[e-mail]>
> > wrote:
> >
> >> Whooaah there...
> >>
> >> What is the status of this poll? I am all for moving from the
> >> subjective
> >> consensus model in which certain parties get a veto because their
> >> opinions
> >> are considered weightier than the rest of us. Objective measures of
> >> consensus are good. But is this an official poll? What does it mean?
> >>
> >> But of course, as John K. pointed out, this is not actually an IETF
> >> process. Only of course it is in every meaningful sense except
> >> insofar as
> >> IETF rules of the road apply.
> >>
> >>
> >> Page numbers is not the hill I would choose to die on here. They
> >> don't
> >> work in HTML and the whole point of this process is that the TXT
> >> documents
> >> reflect very badly on the IETF as an organization. It spoke of an
> >> organization that is stuck in the 1960s ranting on about how vinyl is
> >> better than CD.
> >>
> >> There are serious issues with the new format. Not least the fact that
> >> SVG
> >> is not actually supported. The supported format is SVG/Tiny which is
> >> an
> >> obsolete format originally proposed back in the WAP days as a means
> >> of
> >> crippling the spec to fit the capabilities of the devices back before
> >> Steve
> >> Jobs showed us an iPhone for the first time. There are no tools that
> >> produce SVG/Tiny, not even GOAT - I had to modify the source code to
> >> comply.
> >>
> >> I don't mind retooling to support an improved specification. Having
> >> to
> >> retool to support an obsolete one is nonsense.
> >>
> >>
> >> Anyway, how about as a compromise, authors can opt to suppress
> >> generation
> >> of the TXT version so that the page number issue doesn't come up at
> >> all?
>
>