Fixed font v multiple fonts

[James Kempf]

IMHO, the font's don't make a big difference.

One thing that does is the inability to do good graphics. It is extremely
difficult, almost impossible, to include graphs of data in IETF documents.
This makes it very hard to present data derived from experiments as
underlying support for a particular engineering approach to a protocol
design. I think this might help to re-enforce the tendency in IETF for
people's opinions on technical matters to be more important than
experimental data. Also, good quality graphics of system designs are
difficult to do with ASCII, ASCII drawing packages not widthstanding. Though
the correlation is somewhat more problemantic, I wonder if this doesn't
contribute some to the tendency in IETF to avoid looking at the larger scale
system aspects of a particular problem, and concentrate more on the point
protocol aspects.  The premise here is that the difficulty in communicating
the result has a tendency to supress the conversation.

For a good example of both these effects, see the IKEv2 draft. While reading
the draft, I found myself looking for some graphs of data to support the
redesign of IKE, and some good system diagrams explaining the underlying
system and protocol flows in all the cases that are discussed in the text.
The few ASCII diagrams in the document are utterly inadequate, IMHO, for
conveying the complexity that the protocol is trying to capture.

            jak

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Brian E Carpenter" <brian at hursley.ibm.com>
To: "Hallam-Baker, Phillip" <pbaker at verisign.com>
Cc: <problem-statement at alvestrand.no>
Sent: Sunday, July 06, 2003 5:28 PM
Subject: Fixed font v multiple fonts


> "Hallam-Baker, Phillip" wrote:
> ...
> > 2.2
> >
> > This section should address the fact that IETF documents are poorly
> > formatted in a fixed width font making them VERY hard to read. They look
> > like a second rate piece of work and many engineers will avoid IETF
process
> > for that reason alone.
>
> Well, I'm currently working both in the IETF (one fixed width font) and
> in the GGF (as many variable fonts as you want). I find IETF documents
> substantially easier to deal with. They are much smaller, which is an
> immense advantage when you are on the road or on a lousy hotel wireless
> network. They are much easier to discuss on mailing lists by trivial cut
> and paste. Even the diagrams can easily be cut, pasted, and updated.
>
> Against this is is the lack of italics or shading to distinguish symbols
> and examples from text; that is certainly an advantage in GGF documents.
>
> There may be some arguments for having the final product look pretty,
> by use of multiple fonts and artistic diagrams. But in my experience,
> using these techniques in documents under development is a problem
> in itself.
>
>     Brian
>
>
>