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formatsummary

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draft-hoffman-rfcformat-canon-others-03

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
  • Dependence on advanced diagrams (or any diagrams) causes accessibility issues
  • If we go beyond ASCII art, need to pick just one format: GIF? PNG? SVG?
  • If we go beyond ASCII art and have the normative diagrams be entirely separate documents, we do not need to limit ourselves to one graphic format

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

HTML Containment

  • Containment is good
  • Containment is unnecessary and not compatible (or perhaps just not required?) with traditional HTML and word processor document

Tags

  • there is no list of tags that will be required for XML or HTML, thus building in required simplification and support for the archival nature of the series (that people can work longer with a simplified set of tags)

XML

ASCII

Containment

  • Containment is good
  • Containment is unnecessary and not compatible (or perhaps just not required?) with traditional HTML and word processor document structure
formatsummary.1342307284.txt.gz · Last modified: 2012/07/14 16:08 by rsewikiadmin