Re: [rfc-i] Really not a poll: RFCs with page numbers (pretty please) ?

[Ted Lemon <[e-mail]>]

On Oct 28, 2020, at 11:01 AM, Henrik Levkowetz <[e-mail]> wrote:
> So the reason why the authors of draft-ietf-nfsv4-rfc5661sesqui-msns
> asked for page numbers for their work with the RPC staff was summed up to
> me as follows (the last draft before the RFC was 673 pages long),
> paraphrased by me:
> 
>  Their document is huge, and the document may have a community that refers
>  to page numbers rather than sections (the document has very deep section
>  numbering, e.g., 6.2.1.3.1).
> 
> Putting the section numbers in the header would not address their issue
> at all.

It seems like this use case can’t be addressed without a different IETF consensus, since presumably the canonical version of the RFC would need page numbers in the TOC in order for this to be useful.

At the same time, this seems like an example of a document that really should never be printed. 673 pages? Why not use HTML anchors?

I don’t mean to be dismissive of peoples’ needs—I’ve been known to print a document so I could mark it up on paper. But this is largely because the tools for marking up canonical forms of documents not on paper don’t exist. If I had to review a document this long, I definitely wouldn’t feel good about printing it and reviewing it on paper.

Perhaps our time would be better spent improving our document markup process rather than arguing about the TOC.

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