Re: [rfc-i] [irsg] Resending: Page numbers in RFCs questions / preferences

[Julian Reschke <[e-mail]>]

Am 26.10.2020 um 13:55 schrieb Carsten Bormann:
> On 2020-10-26, at 11:51, David Noveck <[e-mail]> wrote:
>>
>> I think it happened with the conversion to v3 xml.  At that time, the 72-character-ragged-right .txt format ceased to be considered canonical (long overdue in my opinion).  As a result, in accord with some RFC that I was pointed to, a decision was made (by whom it wasn't clear) to make all TOCs the same, so that the pdf and text TOCs lost theirs since there was no way to add them to html which doesn't have them.  The logic is impeccable if you grant the premises and nobody ever considered rethinking the premises when it resulted in nearly useless printed documents. Sigh!
>
> Obviously, with canonical XML, there is no good solution to this problem: Different renditions will have different concepts of pages, so the TOC’s won’t align.
>
> (That is not a good argument for then finally choosing what is probably the worst possible solution to this problem.  I think what happened is that nobody thought about PDF where we continue to have pages, so there never really was a problem specific to retaining pages and thus page numbers in the TXT.)
> ...

Fun fact: RFC 7994 ("Requirements for Plain-Text RFCs") says in
<https://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/rfc7994.html#rfc.section.4.2>:

"In order to retain similar content wherever possible between the
various publication formats, the table of contents will list section and
subsection numbers and titles but will not include page numbers."

But RFC 7995 ("PDF Format for RFCs") say in
<https://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/rfc7995.html#n-similarity-to-other-outputs>:

"The table of contents (generated if the XML's <rfc> element's
tocInclude attribute has the value "true") [RFC7991] will have the
section number linked to the section start but will also include a page
number that is linked to the corresponding page. The section title and
the page number will be separated by a visually appropriate separator,
and the page numbers will be aligned with each other."

And, FWIW, RFC 7992 ("HTML Format for RFCs") says nothing about page
numbering. And that is the case not because it's not possible in HTML,
but just a CSS/output format issue. Given the right CSS (as produced by
rfc2629.xslt) and the right HTML-to-PDF converter (such as PrinceXML),
you will indeed get page numbers.

Best regards, Julian

PS: and yes, page numbers should not be used to refer to parts of the
RFC, because page breaks vary with output formats
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