Notes about Existing HTML
Considering look & feel, some (fairly subjective) notes are below.
For comparison, various HTML pages:
- [A] Julian's latest: http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/draft-reschke-xml2rfc-latest.html
- [C] Tools: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5234
- [D] Datatracker: http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc5234/
- [E] xml2rfc v1: https://www.rfc-editor.org/test/test_v1.html (*)
- [F] xml2rfc v2: https://www.rfc-editor.org/test/test_v2.html (*)
(*) Note: Test file posted for this purpose only. It is based on, but not equivalent to, RFC 5234.
Regarding [A]:
1) the fonts
- serif vs. sans serif
I find the mix of serif (for body) and sans-serif (for titles) not great.
For comparison:- [B] uses all serif.
- [E] and [F] use all sans-serif (except in figures).
- Numerals in this sans-serif font family look odd b/c of how some numbers go lower and the “2” is relatively small. For example see 2.5.1.3.
- Lack of flexibility with browser preferences: When I change my browser's preferred serif or sans-serif font, nothing changes.
2) The gray box for the header
If there were 5 authors, the gray box would be big -- 11 lines.
I like it better than [B], but I wonder if there is a better way to do the header.
3) Figures (background color)
[A] doesn't contain an example of a figure; curious to see if it does the same as [E] (box with a gray background) or [F] (box with light yellow background). I prefer the yellow.
Paul says that he prefers no background colors at all for text-based figures and listings because even light colors makes it somewhat harder to read the text.
4) Accent colors
[A] uses green for the title; blue for links.
[E] uses red for title; red for links.
[F] uses red for title; blue for links.
I don't feel strongly, but [A] is fine.
5) Table of Contents (linked text)
[A] each number is an internal link *and* each section title is an internal link. I think it looks odd. (And they are not necessarily the same, e.g., http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/draft-reschke-xml2rfc-latest.html#elements vs. #rfc.section.2).
- [B] section titles only
- [C] numbers only
- [D] (no links)
- [E] numbers only
- [F] section titles only
Paul prefers links on section titles because they are longer and therefore easier to click on.
6) references
Look at [XML] in section 5.1. Both the title and the URL are links to the same file. This seems redundant. Is it necessary that titles be links?
Aspects of [E] that have purposely been dropped?
- link back to TOC at every section
- syntax highlighting for ABNF (type=“abnf”). See section 4.
- in the references, each author's name is a mailto link. [IMHO, this is a good one to drop.]