Re: [art] New RFCs text formatting

[Keith Moore <[e-mail]>]

On 11/30/19 10:59 PM, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:

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

I thought the format was a compromise between US Letter format, A4 
format, and printers.   The horizontal line length was short enough for 
A4 format.   The number of lines per page was short enough for Letter 
format.   And even those printers capable of centering a text image on a 
page, didn't do so by default.  Some printers could print 66 lines on a 
page, but some could only print 60 or even 58.  A lot of printers were 
set so that the start of a page (after receiving a form feed or page 
advance button press) was some distance down from the perforation or top 
of the actual page, so that there would be some margin at the top 
(sometimes used for binding) and the printed text wouldn't creep to 
overlap the perforations on continuous-feed paper.

(In hindsight maybe the line lengths should have been even shorter so 
that RFCs would look equally ugly when printed in either Letter or A4 
format, but nothing's perfect.)

In some ways it's still a better format than anything else, including 
HTML and PDF.

What would be parochial would be to assume that nobody in the world 
needs to print RFCs using mechanical printers any more - that everyone 
in the world should have laser printers, ample power for their fusers, 
and a generous supply of suitable paper and toner - or for that matter 
that everyone in the world should have multiple displays so they can 
read RFCs on one screen while writing code or other specifications on 
another one.   Yes, the plain text RFC format is a low-tech format 
intended for low-tech devices.   That's a feature, not a bug.

Keith

p.s. Some may not be aware, and some may have forgotten, that I was the 
first to set up an "RFCs in PDF" page (I believe there was also an "I-Ds 
in PDF" page) so that those readers who were forced to use Windows would 
still have a way to print out RFCs with appropriate pagination.   It 
seemed like overkill to use PDF for that, but it wasn't too hard to 
implement and it was fit for purpose.  I'm all about making RFCs 
accessible (yes, even for Windows users :) but not about breaking things 
that work.