ASCII art (was: lots of other threads)

At 4:51 PM -0500 11/17/05, Sam Hartman wrote:
>  >>>>> "Hallam-Baker," == Hallam-Baker, Phillip <pbaker@verisign.com> writes:
>
>
>     Hallam-Baker,> I do not think that you really care about
>     Hallam-Baker,> accessibility. If you did you would understand why
>     Hallam-Baker,> the idea of putting ASCII art through a text to
>     Hallam-Baker,> speech interface is utterly ridiculous. At least in
>     Hallam-Baker,> HTML the voice synthesizer knows that it has come
>     Hallam-Baker,> to a diagram that it should not attempt to
>     Hallam-Baker,> interpret.
>
>
>I actually can get some content out of ascii art diagrams.

Oh, Sam, why ruin a perfectly good rant with real-life data?

>I wouldn't mind though if the IETF went away from ascii diagrams
>provided that they commit to guaranteeing that the normative text is
>complete without the diagrams.  No, doing that is not as hard as some
>people seem to think.

Many ASCII-art diagrams *supplement*, rather than replace, prose 
descriptions. Given what many of us have seen in deployed 
implementations of IETF protocols, it is naive to assume that saying 
something in just one fashion is sufficient for it to be understood. 
In some WGs, when the ASCII art conflicts with the text above or 
below it, it leads to a useful discussion of how to fix the body text.

A good test for a document in mid-development would be "cover up the 
ASCII art and see if the body text is still understandable". The same 
would be true for documents where there is explanatory text and { 
ABNF | C code | Perl code | ASN.1 | ... }.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--VPN Consortium

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