RFC9402: a notation to express exactly how your cat is wedged

April 1, 2023 5:39 PM

Since there is currently no compact notation for describing such media, this document details a standard notation to describe the position and interaction of cats, containers, and related subjects pictured in these images.

An April Fool's joke- for the uninitiated, RFCs are documents proposing internet standards, among other things.

It appears to be missing an all-important scanner glyph.

posted by BungaDunga (9 comments total)

*shakes head sadly*

They're gonna hafta update this one. It doesn't cover interactions of cats with blankets.
posted by humbug at 6:16 PM on April 1, 2023 [7 favorites]

The need for an arbitrary number of opening and closing characters makes me think that the reliance on brackets is not sustainable. Instead, this would need to evolve into some form of CatML, with tags representing all of the objects that may exist in relation to a cat (and self-closing tags for those objects that do not currently contain a cat). E.g. <scanner>c</scanner><box>at</box>/<table/> would represent a cat with its head in a scanner but the rest of its body draped inside a box, all on top of a table.

Of course text would be limited to the word "cat" and the directional glyphs identified in RFC9402. Any parser that recognized words other than "cat" as text would not be a valid CatML parser.
posted by Not A Thing at 7:29 PM on April 1, 2023 [3 favorites]

They need to define “cat”.
posted by TedW at 7:33 PM on April 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Fools'_Day_Request_for_Comments for other historic entries
posted by Penumbra at 8:02 PM on April 1, 2023 [2 favorites]

How does this interact with the stray shopping cart taxonomy?
posted by credulous at 8:27 PM on April 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

You might want to visit the website of one of the authors, dragon.best, for more, similarly important, information.
posted by JHarris at 9:19 PM on April 1, 2023

They need to define “cat”.
q.v. §2.1:

Cat:
A cat is a special kind of subject of feline origin. This document will assume a house cat is present in the source media; however, other felines are also acceptable.

posted by zamboni at 7:29 AM on April 2, 2023 [1 favorite]

MetaFilter: a house cat is present in the source media.
posted by Not A Thing at 9:08 AM on April 2, 2023 [3 favorites]

This seems almost a useful standard for image annotation and could be generalized to other pets for example consider a picture of a [d]og.
posted by interogative mood at 11:36 AM on April 2, 2023