Requirements for Plain-Text RFCs

In 2013, after a great deal of community discussion, the decision was made to shift from the plain-text, ASCII-only canonical format for RFCs to XML as the canonical format with more human-readable formats rendered from that XML. The high-level requirements that informed this change were defined in RFC6949, "RFC Series Format Requirements and Future Development." Plain text remains an important format for many in the IETF community, and will still be one of the publication formats rendered from the XML. This draft documents the rendering requirements for the plain-text RFC publication format. These requirements do not apply to plain-text RFCs published before the format transition.¶

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 July 15, 2016.¶

Copyright (c) 2016 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document authors. All rights reserved.¶

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In 2013, after a great deal of community discussion, the decision was made to shift from the plain-text, ASCII-only canonical format for RFCs to XML as the canonical format [XML-ANNOUNCE]. The high-level requirements that informed this change were defined in [RFC6949], "RFC Series Format Requirements and Future Development." Plain text remains an important format for many in the IETF community, and will still be one of the publication formats rendered from the XML. This draft documents the rendering requirements for the plain-text RFC publication format. These requirements do not apply to plain-text RFCs published before the format transition.¶

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] In other words, plain-text files cannot include embedded character formatting or style information. The actual character encoding, however, is not limited to any particular sequence of code points.¶

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 memo. For more details on general style, see "The RFC Style Guide." [RFC7322]¶

• The existing tools used by the RFC Editor and many members of the author community to create the text file are complicated to change and support; manual manipulation is often required for the final output. In particular, handling page breaks and associated widows and orphans for paginated output is tricky [WIDOWS].
• 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 should 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.¶

The details described in this document are expected to change based on experience gained in implementing the RFC production center's toolset. Revised documents will be published capturing those changes as the toolset is completed. Other implementers must not expect those changes to remain backwards-compatible with the details described this document.¶

Plain-text files for 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.¶

Many elements within the xml2rfc v3 vocabulary have an attribute for the ASCII equivalent to a non-ASCII character string. The ASCII equivalent will be rendered within the plain-text as per the guidance 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.¶

Artwork is defined as anything marked by the XML >artwork< element (see Section 2.5 of "The 'XML2RFC' version 3 Vocabulary" [I-D.iab-xml2rfc]. Only the 'type=ascii-art' will be rendered within the plain-text format. This marks 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. If there is conflicting information between the publication formats, please review the XML and PDF files to resolve the conflict.¶

One plain-text output will be created during the publication process with basic pagination that includes a form feed instruction every 58 lines at most, including blank lines. Instructions or a script will be made available by and for the community to strip out pagination as per individual preference.¶

The plain-text does not attempt to render anything but the most basic document metadata from the XML. The document layout and structure is instead guided directly by the RFC Style Guide and the updates reflected in the web portion of the Style Guide [STYLEWEB]. URIs that occur in targets may be placed into parenthetical expressions or reference entries [I-D.iab-xml2rfc].¶

Since plain-text cannot include any rich-text-style formatting, such as bold or italic fonts, tags such as <em> and <strong> will not be rendered in any way in the plain-text draft.¶

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.¶

This memo includes no requests to IANA.¶

The requirements of the plaintext format involve no significant security considerations. As part of the larger format project, however, unintended changes to the text as a result of the transformation from the base XML file could in turn corrupt a standard, practice or critical piece of information about a protocol.¶