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

[Henk Birkholz <[e-mail]>]

Hi all,

TL;DR
Gave up on looking up rfc-interest WGLC results from years ago; plenty 
use of the term surprise.


I admit, I was surprised by the notion that "there will be no more page 
numbers" over a year ago. I was not involved in any way in WGLCs that 
happened in rfc-interest in... 2015?

I can understand that people are now puzzled by these decisions back 
then, to be honest. Typically, I fault myself for not spending enough 
attention, so.. my bad. I spent some attention right now - and it 
yielded this:

> https://www.rfc-editor.org/pipermail/rfc-interest/

and I am certainly not going to do this right now:

> https://trac.tools.ietf.org/group/tools/trac/wiki/Imap#Overview

So yes, there probably was some discussion on something that resulted in 
consensus in some scope. I cannot easily check that right now (attention 
span and kids bedtime and such), but I can state that I am not surprised 
that this somehow violates the principle of least surprise, today.

Oh... and why was I trying to skim the archive? To find out why a TOC in 
HTML is harmful in a way that page numbers are harmful :o)

Viele Grüße,

Henk

On 26.10.20 22:48, Jeffrey Haas wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 26, 2020 at 06:36:19PM +0000, Acee Lindem (acee) wrote:
>> I wasn't involved in the RFC format discussion either but can't see how
>> removing the pagination could have been seen as an advantage.
>> Additionally, it is annoying that the htmlized version don't provide links
>> to sections/sub-sections from TOC.
> 
> I understand why the page numbers were removed.  I think you're getting to
> the more core issue: There is a need to provide a way to refer to portions
> of documents easily.
> 
> For individual sections, the TOC absolutely should provide linkage to
> sections, especially in formats like HTML.
> 
> The input XML already provides blocks.  It should be fairly reasonable for
> the tool to provide you something like "this is section X.Y, ¶5".
> 
> How such a thing would eventually manifest in our old school email
> discussions is likely to be the ugly discussion.
> 
> -- Jeff
>