5 ms·

I love the way the IETF is still issuing reports formatted for ancient mainframe line printers, with hard-coded headers and footers and whatnot.

by spolsky 17y ago

rbanffy 17y ago
Think of it as future-proofing their documents. Paper has two advantages: it keeps carbon from becoming a greenhouse gas and quite probably outlasts all our other backup mediums.
- dmoney 17y ago
  Except clay tablets and this: http://rosettaproject.org/disk/concept/ http://rosettaproject.org/disk/concept/
  - blogimus 17y ago
    And unlike clay tablets, the rosetta disk even has some ISO compliance.
    - dmoney 17y ago
      Which ISO is that?
  - gurtwo 17y ago
    Ugh! Nasty crash on their website; http://staging.rosettaproject.org/blog/02008/nov/3/macro-micro-etching/ http://staging.rosettaproject.org/blog/02008/nov/3/macro-mic... "You're seeing this error because you have DEBUG = True in your Django settings file. Change that to False, and Django will display a standard 500 page."
    - joshwa 17y ago
      seems they linked to their staging site (publicly accessible!!) by accident. Same page without staging subdomain: http://www.rosettaproject.org/blog/02008/nov/3/macro-micro-etching/ http://www.rosettaproject.org/blog/02008/nov/3/macro-micro-e...
malkia 17y ago
I preffer it that way. I can easily copy + paste it, put in a comment in the source code. It's way easier to exchange.
- _delirium 17y ago
  I like the ASCII text aspect for that reason, but does it really need the hard-coded headers and footers every 50 lines?
jacquesm 17y ago
The RFCS are all in this format, and since this provides some continuity across the whole set, I'm all for continuing in this way. Think about what would happen if they made them all spiffy pdfs and then some guy 20 years from now would try to read them. ASCII is forever, and having a page header on every page is relatively cheap, and helps to keep the context of which document you're looking at clear, the header is never more than 1/2 a page away. It's quite hard to make a scrolling window with a steady header on a piece of paper ;)

I love the way the IETF is still issuing reports formatted for ancient mainframe line printers, with hard-coded headers and footers and whatnot.

by spolsky 17y ago

I love the way the IETF is still issuing reports formatted for ancient mainframe line printers, with hard-coded headers and footers and whatnot.

rbanffy 17y ago

Think of it as future-proofing their documents. Paper has two advantages: it keeps carbon from becoming a greenhouse gas and quite probably outlasts all our other backup mediums.

dmoney 17y ago
Except clay tablets and this: http://rosettaproject.org/disk/concept/ http://rosettaproject.org/disk/concept/
- blogimus 17y ago
  And unlike clay tablets, the rosetta disk even has some ISO compliance.
  - dmoney 17y ago
    Which ISO is that?
- gurtwo 17y ago
  Ugh! Nasty crash on their website; http://staging.rosettaproject.org/blog/02008/nov/3/macro-micro-etching/ http://staging.rosettaproject.org/blog/02008/nov/3/macro-mic... "You're seeing this error because you have DEBUG = True in your Django settings file. Change that to False, and Django will display a standard 500 page."
  - joshwa 17y ago
    seems they linked to their staging site (publicly accessible!!) by accident. Same page without staging subdomain: http://www.rosettaproject.org/blog/02008/nov/3/macro-micro-etching/ http://www.rosettaproject.org/blog/02008/nov/3/macro-micro-e...

malkia 17y ago

I preffer it that way. I can easily copy + paste it, put in a comment in the source code. It's way easier to exchange.

_delirium 17y ago
I like the ASCII text aspect for that reason, but does it really need the hard-coded headers and footers every 50 lines?

jacquesm 17y ago

The RFCS are all in this format, and since this provides some continuity across the whole set, I'm all for continuing in this way. Think about what would happen if they made them all spiffy pdfs and then some guy 20 years from now would try to read them. ASCII is forever, and having a page header on every page is relatively cheap, and helps to keep the context of which document you're looking at clear, the header is never more than 1/2 a page away. It's quite hard to make a scrolling window with a steady header on a piece of paper ;)