Requirements for Plain-Text RFCs
draft-flanagan-plaintext-02

Abstract

This draft documents the change in requirements and layout for the plain-text RFC publication format.

Editorial Note (To be removed by the RFC Editor)

Discussion of this draft takes place on the rfc-interest mailing list (rfc-interest@rfc-editor.org), which has its home page at https://www.rfc-editor.org/mailman/listinfo/rfc-interest.

Status of This Memo

This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.

Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet-Drafts is at http://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.

Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."

This Internet-Draft will expire on March 15, 2015.

Copyright Notice

Copyright (c) 2014 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. Code Components extracted from this document must include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as described in the Simplified BSD License.

Table of Contents

• 1. Introduction
• 2. Character Encoding
• 3. Figures and Artwork
• 4. General Page Format Layout
• 4.1. Headers and Footers
• 4.2. Table of Contents
• 4.3. Line Width
• 4.4. Line Spacing
• 4.5. Hyphenation
• 5. Acknowledgements
• 6. IANA Considerations
• 7. Security Considerations
• 8. References
• 8.1. Normative References
• 8.2. Informative References
• Author's Address

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 to XML [XML-ANNOUNCE]. The high-level requirements for the format of RFCs were defined in "RFC Series Format Requirements and Future Development [RFC6949]." Several different publication formats will be rendered from that canonical XML, including HTML, PDF, TXT, and EPUB.

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. Plain text interchange is commonly used between computer systems that do not share higher-level protocols." [unicode-glossary]

A plain-text output for RFCs will continue to be required for the foreseeable future. The details of what that means for RFCs in terms of which character encoding may be used, what the page layout will look like, how to handle figures and artwork, and how pagination will be handled, are documented in this draft.

The following assumptions drive the changes in the plain-text output for RFCs:

• The existing tools used by the RFC Editor and many members of the author community to create the text file are extremely sensitive; manual manipulation is required in the final output. In particular, handling page breaks and associated widows and orphans for paginated output is tricky.
• Additional publication formats--for example: PDF, HTML-- will be available that will offer features such as markup, pretty printing, etc.
• There is an extensive tool chain in existence among the community to work with plain-text documents. Similar functionality may be possible with other publication formats, but the workflow that uses the existing tool chain must be supported as much as is considered practical.

Where practical, the original guidance for the structure of a plain-text RFC has been kept, such as with line lengths, lines per page, etc. [INS2AUTH]

Note that this document provides guidance for plain-text RFCs; Internet-Drafts are out of scope.

2. Character Encoding

Plain text RFCs will use the UTF-8 [RFC3629] character encoding. That said, the use of non-ASCII characters will be only allowed in a limited and controlled fashion. The details regarding the guidance for how to include non-ASCII characters is under development and documented in "The Use of Non-ASCII Characters in RFCs" [I-D.flanagan-nonascii]. Please view the PDF version of that draft.

The plain-text file will include a byte order mark (BOM) to provide text reader software with in-band information about the character encoding scheme used.

3. Figures and Artwork

Authors may continue to include figures drawn with ASCII characters. If the canonical format includes figures or artwork other than ASCII-art, then the plain-text output must include a pointer to the relevant figure in the HTML version of the RFC to allow readers to see the relevant artwork.

Authors who wish to include ASCII-art for the plain-text file and SVG art for the other outputs may do so, but they should be aware of the potential for confusion to individuals reading the RFC with two unique diagrams describing the same content.

4. General Page Format Layout

Arguments both in favor of and against pagination have been offered by members of the community and summarized in RFC 6949. After further discussion, two plain-text outputs will be created during the publication process - one with basic pagination that includes a form feed instruction every 58 lines at most, including blank lines, depending on the text and artwork layout, and a second with no pagination at all. This will allow for both easier cut and paste from the plain-text file, uninterupted diff output, disambiguation between page breaks that may also be paragraph breaks, and a better printing experience for those working with the plain-text output .

4.1. Headers and Footers

The front matter on the front page (such as the RFC number and category), and the back matter on the last page (the author's full names and contact information) will continue with the structure described in RFC 5741 [RFC5741], "RFC Streams, Headers, and Boilerplates". Given the removal of the pagination requirement, running headers and footers will no longer exist.

4.2. Table of Contents

Given the removal of the pagination requirement, the Table of Contents will list section and subsection numbers and titles, but will not include page numbers.

4.3. Line Width

Each line must be limited to 72 characters followed by the character sequence that denotes an end-of-line (EOL). This limit includes any left-side indentation.

Note: A plain-text RFC is expected to be stored on a disk file using the EOL sequence of that system. For example, MS DOS-based systems use the two-character sequence: CR LF (Carriage Return followed by Line Feed), Unix systems use the single character LF for EOL, and EBCDIC systems use the single character NL (New Line).

Whenever an RFC is transmitted across the Internet, Internet protocol convention requires that each line of text be followed by the two-character EOL sequence CR LF (Carriage Return followed by Line Feed). A user level protocol (e.g., FTP, Telnet, HTTP, SMTP, ...) must make the appropriate EOL transformation at each line end. Note that binary transmission of plain-text RFC files can cause the sender's EOL convention to "leak" into the receiver, causing confusion.

4.4. Line Spacing

Use single-spaced text within a paragraph, and one blank line between paragraphs.

4.5. Hyphenation

Hyphenated words, including hyphenated word sequences (e.g., "Internet-Draft"), should not be split across successive lines.

5. Acknowledgements

This draft owes a great deal of thanks to the efforts of the RFC Format Design Team: Nevil Brownlee, Tony Hansen, Joe Hildebrand, Paul Hoffman, Ted Lemon, Julian Reschke, Adam Roach, Alice Russo, Robert Sparks, and David Thaler.

6. IANA Considerations

This memo includes no requests to IANA.

7. Security Considerations

TBD.

8. References

8.1. Normative References

8.2. Informative References

Author's Address