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

Hi,

* Richard Hartmann

> 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.

It was just one example. Another would be ripe-566, which has a couple
of tables. Sure, you can create an ASCII art tables, but doing so and at
the same time everything below 72 characters of width might not be
easiest thing in the world. A future document might want to include some
other figures or other external content which cannot be (easily)
represented in plain text.

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

Because once that PDF is the authoritative version it's hard for someone
else to come along and make changes to it later.

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

Reasonably, if you keep the amount of markup to a minimum. The point
after all isn't to get RIPE documents that are glitzy AJAX Web2.0 HTML5
interactive stuff, just to allow for the inclusion of basic figures,
tables, images and a minimum of formatting.

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

I have a nasty tendency to write very long lines, so I think perhaps if
you do "max one sentence per line" you want to do it *in addition* to a
max line length of N chars. The result will probably look weird in plain
text though, but not so in HTML (as newline characters don't get
rendered as such).

Best regards,
-- 
Tore Anderson