Requirements for Plain-Text RFCs
RFC 7994
Document | Type |
RFC - Informational
(December 2016; No errata)
Was draft-iab-rfc-plaintext (iab)
|
|
---|---|---|---|
Author | Heather Flanagan | ||
Last updated | 2016-12-16 | ||
Replaces | draft-flanagan-plaintext | ||
Stream | IAB | ||
Formats | plain text html pdf htmlized bibtex | ||
Stream | IAB state | Published RFC | |
Consensus Boilerplate | Yes | ||
RFC Editor Note | (None) |
Internet Architecture Board (IAB) H. Flanagan Request for Comments: 7994 RFC Editor Category: Informational December 2016 ISSN: 2070-1721 Requirements for Plain-Text RFCs Abstract In 2013, after a great deal of community discussion, the decision was made to shift from the plain-text, ASCII-only canonical format for RFCs to XML as the canonical format with more human-readable formats rendered from that XML. The high-level requirements that informed this change were defined in RFC 6949, "RFC Series Format Requirements and Future Development". Plain text remains an important format for many in the IETF community, and it will be one of the publication formats rendered from the XML. This document outlines the rendering requirements for the plain-text RFC publication format. These requirements do not apply to plain-text RFCs published before the format transition. Status of This Memo This document is not an Internet Standards Track specification; it is published for informational purposes. This document is a product of the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) and represents information that the IAB has deemed valuable to provide for permanent record. It represents the consensus of the Internet Architecture Board (IAB). Documents approved for publication by the IAB are not a candidate for any level of Internet Standard; see Section 2 of RFC 7841. Information about the current status of this document, any errata, and how to provide feedback on it may be obtained at http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7994. Flanagan Informational [Page 1] RFC 7994 Plain-Text RFCs December 2016 Copyright Notice Copyright (c) 2016 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document authors. All rights reserved. This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document. Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect to this document. Table of Contents 1. Introduction ....................................................2 2. Character Encoding ..............................................4 3. Figures and Artwork .............................................4 4. General Page Format Layout ......................................4 4.1. Headers and Footers ........................................5 4.2. Table of Contents ..........................................5 4.3. Line Width .................................................5 4.4. Line Spacing ...............................................5 4.5. Hyphenation ................................................5 5. Elements from the xml2rfc v3 Vocabulary .........................5 6. Security Considerations .........................................6 7. References ......................................................6 7.1. Normative References .......................................6 7.2. Informative References .....................................7 IAB Members at the Time of Approval ................................8 Acknowledgements ...................................................8 Author's Address ...................................................8 1. Introduction In 2013, after a great deal of community discussion, the decision was made to shift from the plain-text, ASCII-only canonical format for RFCs to XML as the canonical format [XML-ANNOUNCE]. The high-level requirements that informed this change were defined in [RFC6949], "RFC Series Format Requirements and Future Development". Plain text remains an important format for many in the IETF community, and it will be one of the publication formats rendered from the XML. This document outlines the rendering requirements for the plain-text RFC publication format. These requirements do not apply to plain-text RFCs published before the format transition. The Unicode Consortium defines "plain text" as "Computer-encoded text that consists only of a sequence of code points from a given standard, with no other formatting or structural information. Flanagan Informational [Page 2] RFC 7994 Plain-Text RFCs December 2016 Plain-text interchange is commonly used between computer systems that do not share higher-level protocols." [UNICODE-GLOSSARY]. In other words, plain-text files cannot include embedded character formatting or style information. The actual character encoding, however, is not limited to any particular sequence of code points.Show full document text