On Tue, May 13, 2025 at 04:43:33PM -0700, 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.
I don't want English prose to normatively describe what an ASN.1 module describes already, but using English prose to fill in blanks that the ASN.1 does not is perfectly fine. And since ASN.1 does not describe _protocols_, English prose to normatively describe _protocols_ is fine. s/ASN.1/<any-other-formal-language>/g If we had a decent formal language to describe protocols then I would alter the above preference to further reduce the dependence on normative English prose. I suppose we already have such languages in the form of programming languages, but getting consensus on _one_ and having the code in RFCs be good enough is probably not happening, so I'll stop at ASN.1/ABNF/... (Also, I'm a big fan of using _APIs_ to help specify _protocols_ including _semantics_, but that is not a popular view at the IETF, sadly.) Nico -- _______________________________________________ rfc-interest mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]
