Hi Tim, on 2005-12-02 02:44 Tim Bray said the following: [snip] > I will now shut up. It is clearly the case that there is tremendous > resistance within the IETF to leaving their comfy ASCII enclave.
Following the debate from the sideline till now, it's clear to me that there are at least a few people who are adamantly against change. I'm not at all convinced that a large majority feels this way. A poll might reveal more than the relative proportions of highly engaged people voicing their views here. As for the issue itself - no, make that some of the issues... A lot of people seem to appreciate the html-ized and PDF-ized versions provided on the tools.ietf.org site, even if the convenience offered by those are small compared to what could be available if a richer format was available during document preparation. Personally, I think we would benefit from * having the XML format championed by xml2rfc as a common source format * having support for the complete range of unicode characters for author attribution in the source format * having the ability to consistently generate multiple presentation format from this - including ASCII and UTF-8 text for textual diffs, html with links for browsing, and pdf for consistent cross-platform printing. Regarding the stability of the presentation format, I note that - A new version of PDF called PDF/A (A for Archive) has recently been standardized in ISO 19005-1 as an "Electronic document file format for long-term preservation". This is going to be around for a while. - HTML 4 is also stable; the latest published version is 4.01 from 1999. - Text, as has been pointed out, is going to be readable long after other formats have come and gone. Yes, that's true, but readable doesn't necessarily mean as easily accessible as other formats. I think we're already seeing that richer formats is passing text as the format of choice for most people, and platform support for easy handling of the different formats is shifting. However - aren't we lucky! If we have a standardized format (RFC 2629 or revisions thereof) from which we can generate multiple presentation formats, we could always use it to generate the format-du-jour if it should come to pass that both PDF/A, HTML 4 and text should be hopelessly outdated... Now, the toughest question here is which presentation format should be normative. I think that something richer than ASCII would be good. It's not clear to me that there is one obvious choice for which format it should be. In 1 or 2 years I might say PDF/A if it has enough tool support, as it's open and free, cross-platform consistent, designed to be stable and long-term accessible. But I'd consider it only if we have a common source format from which we can reliably produce other versions such as HTML for browsing and ASCII/UTF-8 for diffing. Henrik _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf