This is an old revision of the document!
Current proposals:
Pagination
Character encoding - ASCII
Character encoding - UTF-8
Allows authors to spell their names correctly; certain special characters in equations or quoted from other texts allowed; citations of web pages using more international characters possible
Exactly what characters are allowed and where the line should be drawn remains unclear (why some characters commonly used in European languages and not other, non-Latin characters? This is just pushing the problem around.)
Mobile Devices
We should take their needs for format flexibility (reflow) in to account
Not enough people use mobile devices, and those that can can generally scroll, so this should be treated as an edge case
ASCII art
Tags
there is no list of tags that will be required for XML or
HTML, thus building in required simplification and support for the archival nature of the series (that people can work longer with a simplified set of tags)
Production and publication issues
Use of tools
We can't be that unique in our needs that we can't use commercial tools
We have more control over the tools we write, to make sure it meets all other requirements, and we have xml2rfc to work from as a base
ASCII art
It forces people to rely more on words and clear written descriptions than the diagrams; each diagram is relatively simple and discrete
The often poor, limited diagrams are a hindrance to visual thinkers
If we go beyond
ASCII art and have the normative diagrams be entirely separate documents, we do not need to limit ourselves to one graphic format
Equations
Some authors have chosen not to publish
RFC due to difficulty in displaying proper mathematical equations
So few
RFC include mathematical equations that this should not be given any priority in the discussion of format
Metadata and tagging
Ability to semantically tag some document info, at least authors' names and references is useful
Metadata is unnecessary overhead
Containment
Containment is good
Containment is unnecessary and not compatible (or perhaps just not required?) with traditional
HTML and word processor document
Lack of containment for sections means that processing software cannot be fully aware of the document structure, and that is serious restriction.
Requiring containment may limit the number of editors authors can use to create documents
Requiring containment would require every authoring format to be translatable to the submission format
Containment
Containment is good and makes certain editorial functions easier
Containment is unnecessary and not compatible (or perhaps just not required?) with traditional
HTML and word processor document structure
Lack of containment for sections means that processing software cannot be fully aware of the document structure
Containment should be optional
HTML
XML
ASCII