Increase default indent for <artwork/sourcecode> in text

[martinthomson]

Description

Problem Statement

A lot of documents that have been published recently have no obvious visual distinction between ordinary paragraphs and code/artwork/etc...

When rendered in HTML, the stylesheet can ensure that there is a visual distinction. The default stylesheet in xml2rfc adds a light grey background and a small amount of indentation for rendered <artwork> or <sourcecode>. That's a pretty effective distinction.

In the text output, these blocks are hard to distinguish. A good example is my own [RFC 9458](RFC 9438 which has a great many code blocks. These all blend into the text, which -- I would argue -- make it less readable.

You could, as RFC 9438 does, center these. But while that works for equations, it's less obviously the right choice for code. Or, you could do as some have done in the past and manually add an indent. That works, but it takes special care to do so consistently within a document and there is no guarantee that the indent is consistent across documents.

Proposed Solution

I would therefore recommend/request that the default indent for <artwork> and <sourcecode> rendering be doubled from 3 characters to 6. As before, if the content is wider than 66 characters (up from 69), that indent can be reduced as it is today. The maximum width would remain 72 characters.

I've implemented a simulation of this for the text-like HTML rendering used by datatracker in ietf-tools/datatracker#8323 as a way of showing how this might look. It is also available on https://github.com/martinthomson/rfc-txt-html if you want to trial it with xml2rfc --css. I think that it's an improvement.

Code of Conduct

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