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

[David Noveck <[e-mail]>]

On Mon, Oct 26, 2020 at 8:55 AM Carsten Bormann <[e-mail]> wrote:

> 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:


It's not clear what problem you are referring to.


> Different renditions will have different concepts of pages, so the TOC’s
> won’t align.
>

There's no reason for them to align with each other.   The paperback and
hardcover editions of books have different TOCs but there is no need for
them to be the same, as long as each matches the document it is a TOC for.

(That is not a good argument for then finally choosing what is probably the
> worst possible solution to this problem.


Actually it's a non-solution to a non-problem.


> I think what happened is that nobody thought about PDF where we continue
> to have pages,


 I think that's probably true.

so there never really was a problem specific to retaining pages and thus
> page numbers in the TXT.)
>
>  I guess this is because nobody thought about TXT files being printed
either.


Grüße, Carsten
>
>