I was having trouble parsing this email. Presumably the problem is on
my end. But assuming others share my reading, may I ask a clarifying
question?
By "the RFC is accessible" are you referring to the important use case
of taking a published RFC and using it as a basis for a new I-D. If
the mathematical representation in the final XML(or markdown?) is
processed compared with what humans can work with, that would seem to
create a problem?
Sorry if I am completely off in left field.
Joel
On 1/29/2026 1:03 AM, Carsten Bormann wrote:
On Jan 29, 2026, at 03:41, John Levine <[email protected]> wrote:
While that is a tour de force of ASCII art (UTF-8 art?) it impresses
me as exactly what we should *not* do.
The objective needs to be that an RFC is accessible, not that each of the
renderings we provide be accessible on its own.
The current situation is untenable for accessibility because we render the math
*before* creating the XML.
That creates high fidelity (at least as long as you have the fonts, which we
can deliver with the PDF, need to reference from copies controlled by us with
HTML, and have no control over with TXT), but it loses the *source*.
There is no actual representation of the math in an RFCXML file today!
That needs to be fixed, and I applaud the effort to make the actual math
available in the RFCXML.
It will then be the HTML that provides the best choices for an accessibility
environment to provide additional accessible renderings.
(The same kind of choice can be applied to other pieces of rendered structured
information; call me strange, but my brain would rather read UML source than
look at Figure 2 in the TXT rendering of RFC 9880-to-be [0].)
(Note that a TXT-rendered formulae can be quite accessible as long as the
rendering is 1-D; it is the 2-D rendering that breaks access. I think we
should nudge the tool providers to get better in doing 1-D renderings, as they
are pretty much needed for inline math anyway, and in indicating whether there
is a good 1-D rendering. Figure 5 of RFC 9438 [1] does rely on 2-D, as do
several unnumbered pieces of block math, so 1-D is not a panacea.)
The other kind of “accessibility” that is often cited as a goal is access for
search tools. It would be good to be able to search for text snippets inside
the math (which is possible today for TXT but not for HTML/PDF), but there is
little hope to search for structure like the one in the unnumbered math block
that follows Figure 2 of RFC 9438 [2]. Again, preserving source to the rescue.
Grüße, Carsten
[0]: https://www.rfc-editor.org/authors/rfc9880.txt#line=469
[1]: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9438#figure-5
[2]: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9438#figure-2
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