Hello Martin, Brian,

On 2025-05-05 09:13, Martin Thomson wrote:
On Mon, May 5, 2025, at 07:10, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
How would we feel about the following statement, in a hypothetical
draft about ASCII art:

"Normative descriptions of protocols, systems, etc. must be fully
represented in the text of the RFC, and must not be contingent on
comprehension of any ASCII art."

My recollection is that this has been the case for as long as I've been 
involved in putting RFCs together.

Do we need an exception to the non-normative rule for cases where the
SVG is directly equivalent to ASCII art for a PDU?

I don't think so.  There are some cases where RFCs have escaped into 
publication without a textual description of the PDU, but I do not consider 
that to be acceptable.  It's almost trivial to provide words that describe the 
PDU layout at the same time as the field semantics are defined.  RFC 791 set a 
good example there.


I agree. Occasionally, ASCII art may be slightly more accessible than SVG, but it will still require a lot of effort for some blind person to understand it. In case we haven't required text equivalents for ASCII art, that's something that we should fix.

Regards,   Martin.

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