Second, your assumption that other SDOs have been able to blissfully make use
of private formats like MS Word without incident is simply untrue. One obvious
counterexample I know of is the CCITT/ITU, which has in the past used MS Word
as a distribution format for many of it's documents. I have quite a few of
these documents on hand and occasionally need to refer to old versions of them,
but when I try and read them using modern tools the results are rarely good.
Many of these documents simply refuse to open, sometimes crashing the tool I'm
using, while others do open but are misformatted, sometimes to the point of
being illegible.
[YJS] I think that something has been lost in the translation here.
ITU (I have participated in the ITU-T for many years, and ALWAYS
sent in my contributions in Word) ONLY accepts contributions in Word
and ONLY works on documents in Word (using ITU designed templates).
The OUTPUT documents are available in Word and PDF, with PDF
the recommended format (due to Word's bad habit of changing pagination
when using different page sizes, etc). The PDF output should be readable
indefinitely.
The Word format is mainly there for people who may need to work on
updates of the standard (unlike RFCs, ITU Recommendations are updated).
If such a Word doc is unreadable for anyone needing it, the
secretariat has tools to convert it.
Y(J)S
_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
Ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf