On Wed, May 14, 2025, at 09:43, Marc Petit-Huguenin wrote: > No to making anything but English sentences normative. People can add > all the examples, diagram, images, and alt tags they want in an RFC, I > am going to ignore all of them and complain loudly that the protocol > cannot be implemented.
Ah, that's roughly the same as Brian's "yes", then. This language we write in is amazing. I also agree, in principle. There is a place for formal definition in languages other than English. Things like formal schema definitions might appear in "figures", which is unclear to a reader, even if we have that distinction in source with <artwork> vs. <sourcecode>. This guidance needs to be limited to <artwork> and non-essential <sourcecode>: imagery, examples, and "supporting" material. The stuff that might help comprehension, but might not need to be formally understood to implement. Normative ABNF (whoa, there's open debate about that as a good idea too, not going to take an absolutist position on that) might need to be normative. But ABNF isn't pictures, so maybe we avoid that problem. Carsten mentioned mathematical formula in RSWG. Those are sometimes presented in SVG and are sometimes critical to understand. They can be explained in words, but the ultimate language of choice for these things in mathematics, not English. English is simply too imprecise. There's a bunch of work that could be done to improve that, which might include carrying LaTeX inputs into the final output, somehow. I suggest that we accept the difference between a good principle (the words describe the thing) and recognize that any such principle will be imperfect in implementation, while also working to address those shortcomings. _______________________________________________ rfc-interest mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]
