Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Pretty RFC

pretty-rfc.herokuapp.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 76 posts

Re: Pretty RFC

#31

Post by rcsorensen »

jrockway wrote: post #11

Interesting. I thought I wanted something like this, but the problem with RFCs is the archaic writing style. It's hard to understand the details of a low-level network protocol when you also have to remember their redefinitions of words like SHOULD, MUST, MAY, MIGHT, PERHAPS, QUITE POSSIBLY and sort through ASCII art that is split across multiple pages. (The standards are also excessively wordy and poorly organized.…

How much of that concern could be helped by displaying tooltips over those words? A little dotted line underneath MUST, and a tooltip with the definition.

Re: Pretty RFC

#33

Post by TeMPOraL »

jrockway wrote: post #11

Interesting. I thought I wanted something like this, but the problem with RFCs is the archaic writing style. It's hard to understand the details of a low-level network protocol when you also have to remember their redefinitions of words like SHOULD, MUST, MAY, MIGHT, PERHAPS, QUITE POSSIBLY and sort through ASCII art that is split across multiple pages. (The standards are also excessively wordy and poorly organized.…

> when you also have to remember their redefinitions of words like SHOULD, MUST, MAY, MIGHT, PERHAPS, QUITE POSSIBLY

So why not generate them with tooltips, i.e. when you hover your mouse over an ALL CAPS word, you'll get a tooltip with RFC2119?

Re: Pretty RFC

#35

Post by ndrarmst »

citricsquid wrote: post #25

As it feels relevant, here's a site of mine that includes all the HTTP Status Codes in an easy referenceable format: http://httpstatus.es/

Thanks for sharing! Much more convenient than Wikipedia, my usual go-to site for status codes.

Re: Pretty RFC

#37

Post by mman »

jrockway wrote: post #11

Interesting. I thought I wanted something like this, but the problem with RFCs is the archaic writing style. It's hard to understand the details of a low-level network protocol when you also have to remember their redefinitions of words like SHOULD, MUST, MAY, MIGHT, PERHAPS, QUITE POSSIBLY and sort through ASCII art that is split across multiple pages. (The standards are also excessively wordy and poorly organized.…

But ignoring all of the ways RFCs could be better, this site is significantly better than the alternatives (the ietf site, plain text on some random domain, or that shitty purple one i always seem to end up on...)

Re: Pretty RFC

#38

Post by _delirium »

smhinsey wrote: post #24
jrockway wrote: post #11

Interesting. I thought I wanted something like this, but the problem with RFCs is the archaic writing style. It's hard to understand the details of a low-level network protocol when you also have to remember their redefinitions of words like SHOULD, MUST, MAY, MIGHT, PERHAPS, QUITE POSSIBLY and sort through ASCII art that is split across multiple pages. (The standards are also excessively wordy and poorly organized.…

The ALL CAPS nature of weather alerts is due to the constraints of a very old but extremely widely deployed alert broadcast system. In the US, at least, the NWS is upgrading their alert broadcast systems so that this will no longer be the case, but this will definitely not happen quickly.

Couldn't they write the canonical version in mixed case, and then convert to all caps for distribution via legacy channels? It doesn't seem like it would be that hard to make it so that, even if it's all-caps in some channels, the version distributed via weather.gov is written in some more readable format. Or is there some legal requirement to have exactly one canonical ASCII version of the warning?
Post reply on HN