> From: John C Klensin <john-ietf(_at_)jck(_dot_)com>
> the state of online collaboration and editing that we have been at for
> 20 or 30 years.
> Finally, there is a longstanding and more or less explicit decision in
> the IETF community to keep the costs of participation as low as possible
There's one other thing, also tied to the IETF (and its predecessor's) long
existence, which is the long-term accessability of online documents - again,
another facet in which our experience is pretty unique. Is MS-Word (or
anything else) going to be 30 years from now?
In case you think this is a silly question, I just recently finished scanning
/ OCR'ing / proofing the oft-cited IEN-19 (Shoch, "Inter-Network Naming,
Addressing, and Routing"), from January 1978 - 28 years ago. The original of
this document was presumably in some Bravo format, and the printing version
was in PRESS - and I somehow doubt either is supported anywhere in the world
now. I only had a hardcopy, so the question's a bit moot, but I very much
doubt a machine-readable version of either form would have done me much good.
ASCII may be pretty lobotomized, but it *is* timeless.
(Not that I'm per-se against allowing more powerful forms, mind, but any
proprietary option is just not viable, IMO.)
Noel
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