Subject: Data points with screenshots, on specification publishing formats

From: Tim Bray <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 21 Mar 2010 14:10:35 -0700

If you add up the numbers, about a quarter of a million seriously
Internet-capable mobile devices are being sold every day between
iPhone, Android, and Blackberry.  I'd like to illustrate the
experience with some screenshots from such a device - this happens to
be a Nexus One Android, which is a typical example of such a thing,
roughly comparable in display capabilities to current iPhones.  I'm
told that Blackberries are a little behind but catching up.

Just suppose, for example, that I wanted to look up the link
relationships defined in RFC4287.  Taking the direct path, if I type
"rfc4287" into google and take the first hit, I get to
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4287.  After I page through several screens
of line breakage to get to the TOC, I see
http://www.tbray.org/reflowable/tvh4.jpg

So, I need to page through 21 80-column 66-line pages; tedious, and
when I was doing this today I went past it by accident, got totally
lost.  Anyhow, eventually I got to this discussion of the link
relationships: Ugly, and I have to work around the page headers:
http://www.tbray.org/reflowable/tvh5.jpg

Finally, I get to the list of link relationships:
http://www.tbray.org/reflowable/tvh6.jpg

Now, I happen to know where to find a sensible minimal-HTML version; a
couple of flicks of the screen get me to the TOC:
http://www.tbray.org/reflowable/tvh1.jpg

I tap directly on the link for section 4.2.7 which gets me this:
http://www.tbray.org/reflowable/tvh2.jpg

Here's list of relationships: http://www.tbray.org/reflowable/tvh3.jpg

Yeah, it's not perfect, I have to do a bit of side-scrolling here and
there; turning the phone sideways is often helpful.  But anyhow, I got
what I wanted in a highly readable format in a small number of seconds
with a couple of taps and swipes.  The browsers are getting better all
the time.

When I raised this as a use case, the defenders of the status quo
essentially suggested that I shouldn't want to use IETF specifications
this way.  I do.

The current format was designed to work well on paper and VT100s.

 -Tim