RSE Wiki Archive

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Pagination

• No pagination: Want a smooth reading experience regardless of page or screen size
• Yes pagination: Ease of reference

Character encoding

• ASCII encoding: Most easily searched and displayed across a variety of platforms
• UTF-8 encoding: Allows authors to spell their names correctly; certain special characters in equations or quoted from other texts allowed; citations of web pages using more international characters possible

Mobile Devices

• We should take their needs for format flexibility (reflow) in to account
• Not enough people use mobile devices, and those that can can generally scroll, so this should be treated as an edge case

Use of tools

• We can't be that unique in our needs that we can't use commercial tools
• We have more control over the tools we write, to make sure it meets all other requirements, and we have xml2rfc to work from as a base

ASCII art

• It does not allow for reflow
• It forces people to rely more on words and clear written descriptions than the diagrams; each diagram is relatively simple and discrete
• The often poor, limited diagrams are a hindrance to visual thinkers

Equations

• Some authors have chosen not to publish RFC due to difficulty in displaying proper mathematical equations
• So few RFC include mathematical equations that this should not be given any priority in the discussion of format

Metadata and tagging

• Ability to semantically tag some document info, at least authors' names and references is useful
• Metadata is unnecessary overhead