From: Bill Manning <bmanning(_at_)ISI(_dot_)EDU>
...
re HTML/PDF: cut&paste?
text search?
ease of conversion to other formats?
Many, but certainly not all of the strong advocates for other formats
don't know, understand, or care about doing any of those.
... And there is nothing
preventing one from taking the authoritative archive and
doing the conversion to foramt'o'the day. A number of folks
have done so. But the authoritative base is still and should
remain (for now) ASCII.
Remember when Postscript was the fad for new, replacement RFC format?
Where would we be now if the Postcript advocates had carried the day
in the late 1980's?
There's another important, if politically incorrect fact. It's a very
good thing to try to accomodate readers of RFC's by converting RFC's from
ASCII to the fad format of the day, but something else to bend over
backwards for I-D authors. An I-D author who cannot easily produce an
ASCII I-D, whether from scratch or from some other format converted to
ASCII, will not have checked (not to mention read) RFC's or other documents
relevant to the issue addressed by the I-D, and is unable to produce an
I-D worth making reading. In other words, than an I-D is in ASCII RFC
form is a good initial filter.
I did say that fact is politically incorrect. I also intentionally
wrote "cannot easily produce" instead of "doesn't want to."
Vernon Schryver vjs(_at_)rhyolite(_dot_)com