[ncc-services-wg] Pre-PDP discussion: "All RIPE documents should be plain text"

On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 10:01 PM, Tore Anderson <tore at fud.no> wrote:

> Plain text is one obvious
> alternative, but would preclude text formatting and inclusion of
> figures, so a document such as ripe-500 can not be converted into plain
> text without loss of information.

I honestly can't see how that picture is really needed to understand
the process. Especially as RIPE would be free to keep a version with a
picture around if it wanted to. But that diagram would work in text,
as well.


> I do not like the idea of using PDF for documents like ripe-500 though.
> PDFs are hard to collaborate on; standard tools like diff cannot
> meaningfully represent the differences between two versions of a
> document. I would prefer something like HTML, where you could download
> an archive file containing the main policy text as a HTML file and any
> figure or image files referred to by it.

Why not collaborate on a text file and export the result into PDF if
it really can not be stored as text?

WRT HTML, can we be certain that it will still render the same in ten years?


> I'd also suggest that a conventional 80-character line length limit
> would be used in the source format, as limiting the line length makes
> reading diffs easier. That doesn't mean the published document's web
> page cannot be reformatted to have longer lines of course (something
> that would happen automatically with HTML).

Very good point, though 78 or even the email default of 72 may make
more sense, especially once people start quoting in emails, etc.
Unified diff already eats one more character, add a single level of
quoting and 78 is too long.

There's a standard for email hidden somewhere that basically says that
trailing whitespace equals word wrap whereas no trailing whitespace
means proper end of line. That eats another column, but it would be
easy to parse. Though if we go that far, why not retain that width for
everything new? Old documents should not be changed for obvious
reasons.


Alternatively, "one sentence per line" would make diffing easier on
the eyes, as well.



Richard