[xml2rfc] Confusing ToC spacing

[fenner at research.att.com (Bill Fenner)]

>possibly. the thing to keep in mind is that the toc generation by the 
>rfc editor has changed over time...

Just for completeness, I wrote a script to run over the repository; of
the 555 documents that it was able to identify that have a ToC with a
section 9 and a section 10, 2 used the xml2rfc format, 209 used the
"always a single space" format, and 344 use the "decrease spacing" format
that I expected.  Of the 2 that use the form that xml2rfc format, one
(rfc2026) was clearly an error since sections 11 and on decrease spacing
again; the other (rfc2189) only has 10 sections so there's no way to
tell.

Using the population of rfc3???, the numbers change to 60 with single-space
and 267 with decrease-spacing.

>i guess the question is: is this really a problem?

I guess it depend on what your expectations are.  I think the increase
spacing format looks dumb.  I think the keep-same-spacing format looks
ok, and the decrease-spacing format looks good.

It's a minor issue, to be sure, but if you're tweaking the number of
spaces after a question mark in a sentence in the middle of the document,
why not tweak the ToC to be consistent with current and historical
practice?

  Bill
>From swb at employees.org  Wed Feb  2 11:55:15 2005
From: swb at employees.org (Scott W Brim)
Date: Wed Feb  2 08:56:24 2005
Subject: [xml2rfc] Confusing ToC spacing
In-Reply-To: <[e-mail]>
References: <[e-mail]>
	<[e-mail]>
	<[e-mail]>
	<[e-mail]>
	<[e-mail]>
Message-ID: <20050202165515.GC560@sbrim-w2k02>

On Wed, Feb 02, 2005 08:50:05AM -0800, Bill Fenner allegedly wrote:
> >i guess the question is: is this really a problem?
> 
> I guess it depend on what your expectations are.  I think the increase
> spacing format looks dumb.  I think the keep-same-spacing format looks
> ok, and the decrease-spacing format looks good.
> 
> It's a minor issue, to be sure, but if you're tweaking the number of
> spaces after a question mark in a sentence in the middle of the document,
> why not tweak the ToC to be consistent with current and historical
> practice?

I agree.  If the column for the text changes based on the width of the
section number it's ugly and makes you look like a programming fred.
We expect better :-).  
>From fenner at research.att.com  Wed Feb  2 09:52:21 2005
From: fenner at research.att.com (Bill Fenner)
Date: Wed Feb  2 09:52:28 2005
Subject: [xml2rfc] Confusing ToC spacing
References: <[e-mail]>
	<[e-mail]>
	<[e-mail]>
	<[e-mail]>
	<[e-mail]>
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>


Turning off tocindent made the ToC appear as I hoped it would.  Now I
have two requests:

1. Please update the README to reflect that tocindent defaults to "yes".
It didn't occur to me to turn off a parameter that defaulted to "no" until
I decided to just try something stupid.

2. Please consider this a bug in either tocindent or the documentation
of what tocindent does, since the documentation says that it indents
subsections and doesn't mention that it also indents section titles
for sections 10 and above.

  Bill
>From dhc2 at dcrocker.net  Wed Feb  2 12:45:39 2005
From: dhc2 at dcrocker.net (Dave Crocker)
Date: Wed Feb  2 12:45:46 2005
Subject: [xml2rfc] Confusing ToC spacing
In-Reply-To: <[e-mail]>
Message-ID: <200522124539.767557@bbprime>

On Tue, 1 Feb 2005 19:05:44 -0800, Bill Fenner wrote:
>  the number of spaces after
>  the section number and period in the ToC confuses me.  When the
>  section number goes from being one digit to two digits, the number
>  of spaces following the "." goes from 2 to 3, resulting in the title
>  starting two characters later --

this strikes me as the sort of thing that should depend more on readability than on precedent.  

having the text start in the same column is more readable.

that means decreasing the space between the number and the text, when the number gets "wider".

d/
--
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
+1.408.246.8253
dcrocker  a t ...
WE'VE MOVED to:  www.bbiw.net