[rfc-i] Following up from Atlanta

[Julian Reschke]

On 2012-12-03 20:32, Nico Williams wrote:
> I was in the room in Atlanta and wanted to re-state my comments
> (somewhat modified since Atlanta) on the list for the record:
>
>   - I would dearly like to retain an Internet-Draft and RFC display form
>     that is amenable to display on text-based terminals.

Lynx is your friend.

>     Unicode, color, line drawing characters -- these are all OK from this
>     point of view.  Though I second comments that color not be used in
>     ways that are essential to convey meaning, for accessibility reasons.
>
>   - Fixed-width fonts are critical for some things: ascii art, and code,
>     for example.

Yes. But just for that.

>     The type of font to use should be up to the editor(s).  This means that
>     a tool like xml2rfc needs to provide some measure of control over this
>     (but we don't really want to specify specific fonts, just whether it should
>     be fixed-width or not).

I believe allowing arbitrary fonts would not lead to consistent look and 
feel.

>   - If there is such a thing as a "canonical" format I don't much care which
>     format that is.  As long as the information in the document does not
>     change substantially between formats there's really no need to
>     declare one format or another "canonical".  I expect that documents
>     which include media that cannot easily or at all be rendered as text
>     will have to have an HTML or PDF or such format be canonical, but we
>     should encourage authors to keep their documents faithfully
>     renderable as text.
>
>   - Note that text is probably the most accessible way to render
>     I-Ds and RFCs.  This is a great reason to keep text renderings around.

What exactly do you mean by "render" here? And are you seriously saying 
plain text is more accessible than HTML?

>   - I don't care what format is used for the source, though any format
>     which lends itself well to diff/merge will be welcomed as such
>     formats facilitate cooperation over distributed version control systems.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Nico


Best regards, Julian