Accommodating the different ways that people read RFCs (includes pagination)

[JayDaley]

There are a number of recurring discussions about the different ways that people read RFCs and this seems to suggest that a more sophisticated approach to publication is required that accommodates a wider variety of reading styles than at present. To cite some examples, of which there are plenty:

• There is the ongoing debate about page breaks in the plain text rendering. Without going into the arguments, what is clear is that some people read text as a one long page scrolling as required and others read a page at a time.
• Some people have recently suggested that acronyms or other shorthand terms are linked in the HTML, either as a popup or a link to a glossary, while others think that would be distracting.

In most cases there is a binary decision on which way to support, but given the power of technology that seems obtuse. Could we instead simply aim to accommodate all the different ways that people read provided a) it's not weird; and b) enough people want it to make the work worth it?

Technically this probably means that the HTML RFCs are presented with a control pane that can be used to twiddle various display features. It probably also means that Plain Text RFCs are rendered in multiple ways and the reader has some way of choosing which one they want to see.

[mnot]

I'm not against this as long as the defaults are carefully thought-out and reasonable; just putting up some controls and dumping the task into the users' hands isn't viable in 2022.

The risk here is that this is very much a design task and performing design-by-committee will lead to predictable results...