On Monday, January 02, 2006 09:36:20 PM +0100 "Tom.Petch"
<sisyphus(_at_)dial(_dot_)pipex(_dot_)com> wrote:
I have always thought that ASCII had much to commend it - ease of use,
compactness, open standard - which outweighed its limited functionality.
But while we debate this, have events already overtaken us? I was
surprised to find, when reading
draft-fu-nsis-qos-nslp-statemachine-02.txt
repeated statements to the effect that if you want to see what this looks
like, look at the .pdf version. It would seem that the system is giving
tacit support to .pdf (although I am cannot readily see just where the
.pdf version is filed:-(
What will anyone say when this I-D reaches last call?
Under our current process, if the responsible AD is doing his/her job, then
the document will never _reach_ last call with normative references to
non-ASCII content.
That is, after all, one of the major facets of the ongoing discussion.
Since someone has asked...
To a certain (large) extent, the format of IETF documents, including
standards documents, needs to be future-proof. That is, we need to be able
to be reasonably sure that someone at some point in the future will still
be able to read our documents. There's been lots of discussion and
arguments about how far in the future we should be worried about, and what
level of effort is reasonable to expect of future readers, and about how
well which formats meet these requirements. However, I daresay there is
rough concensus that some level of future-readability is required.
In order to achieve that future-readability, it is desirable to require our
documents to use a specific format, or perhaps one of several specific
formats. Such formats should be well-documented as to their syntax and
semantics, just as we would do for a network protocol. It is not necessary
to specify that documents be produced by a particular tool or that a
particular tool be used to read them, only that they be in a particular
form.
We don't specify network protocols in terms of specific implementations;
why should we do so for our document formats?
-- Jeffrey T. Hutzelman (N3NHS) <jhutz+(_at_)cmu(_dot_)edu>
Sr. Research Systems Programmer
School of Computer Science - Research Computing Facility
Carnegie Mellon University - Pittsburgh, PA
_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
Ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf