Re: [art] New RFCs text formatting

[Phillip Hallam-Baker <[e-mail]>]

On Sat, Nov 30, 2019 at 10:12 PM Joel Halpern Direct <
[e-mail]> wrote:

> That (the suggestions that RFC-interest is the wrong place to judge such
> things) may be, which is why I listed alternatives.  But just saying
> that two people liked the idea, and no one screamed, in one day, is
> clearly NOT enough to change the default.


Quite. The botched pagination of the old plaintext format was one of the
main reasons I hated it. The parochial US-centric design ensures that it
only works reliably on US paper which is only used in North America.

So for years, I would have to make multiple attempts at tweaking page
lengths on printers to get RFCs to print out right. And after a while, I
gave up, and wrote myself a PERL script to convert them to HTML and those
are the docs I worked from all the time I was at the Web consortium and
then at VRSN until xml2rfc appeared with a HTML output.

I have never used the plaintext format. I have always regarded it as
garbage. This is a technology business. If we are going to get nostalgic
about stuff, perhaps we should start with all the newspaper people,
shopworkers, etc. etc. we put out of work. It seems rather incongruous and
not a little self-indulgent to find the vanguard of the digerati waxing
nostalgic over emulating 1960s line printer formats while they are merrily
shredding the fabric of the old economic order for everyone else.


What does concern me with the current state of affairs is that we have HTML
output of RFCs but not yet of IDs it would seem.