Re: [Rswg] draft-mcquistin-augmented-ascii-diagrams

[Colin Perkins <[e-mail]>]

On 29 Oct 2023, at 11:59, John R Levine wrote:

> On Sat, 28 Oct 2023, Colin Perkins wrote:
>> The entire point of this draft is that it doesn't require any change to the RFC format. It doesn't need to be embedded into artwork, source code, media types, or anything of the sort.
>
> Sorry, but no.  For these things to be legible, they need to be wrapped in XML elements to say to preserve the line breaks and to display them in fixed pitch text.  By the time you do that, it's easier to wrap them in <sourcecode>, which has the added benefit of working with all the other tools people have to extract and manage sourcecode elements

Sorry, I realise I wasn't clear. We wrap the packet diagrams in <artwork> as usual. What I meant to say is that it doesn't require any new embedding mechanisms.

> without needing an extra kludge to look for the special phrase.

The "special phrase" is semantically meaningful to name the packet format. Similarly, the structured text following the diagram conveys meaning. These are both semantically part of the packet description format.

> So once again it seems reasonable to move the definition of the diagrams ahead, and leave the embedding methods for later.

The diagrams aren't meaningful without the surrounding text. The way they are embedded within the text is part of the format.

Colin