[rfc-i] rfc-interest Digest, Vol 89, Issue 11
julian.reschke at gmx.de
Thu Mar 22 00:06:47 PDT 2012
On 2012-03-22 01:18, Ole Jacobsen wrote:
> As I contemplate 25 years in the "Publishing Business" (sort of), I
> find myself wondering if we are really discussing a "presentation
> format" or something else (as well). We clearly care A LOT about what
> an RFC looks like, that is really "set in stone" in the same way I
> used to approve films, or paste-up boards, and nowadays PDF files,
> that are supposed to represent "what it will look like when printed."
> Flexibility in output (presentation) formats to accommodate "a wide
> range of platforms" seems like a nice goal until you start looking at
> the nitty-gritty details. When you let lines wrap, well, they wrap
> and carefully lined-up stuff no longer lines up.
If content was carefully lined-up, then the presentation format needs to
handle it as preformatted content. That's a solved problem.
> I don't have any bright ideas, but simply picking an existing
> "standard" (other than ASCII) is probably not the answer until we
> understand all the consequences.
Please stop confusing character sets with file formats.
The current publication format is text/plain, encoded in US-ASCII.
We can change the media type without changing the encoding, such as by
moving to "text/plain; format=flowed".
We can change the encoding without changing the media type, such as by
moving to "text/plain", encoded in UTF-8.
Best regards, Julian
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