On Nov 14, 2005, at 8:56 AM, Stewart Bryant wrote:
<snip>
BTW - one carrot that would tempt me away would be if the
result allowed the normative text to incorprate proper
diagrams - like ITU and IEEE - two name but two - have
use in their specifications for the last 20 or so years.
The issue of diagrams is entangled in the long-standing discussion of
proprietary formats. There is a huge benefit in having a format that
*everyone* can access without difficulty or cost. I can't begin to
tell you the impact I felt when I walked into a university half way
around the world in an underdeveloped country and had a graduate
student show me some pretty sophisticated stuff he had done based on
RFCs he had downloaded from the net. ASCII is an enormous advantage
from that respect.
At the same time, we have clearly hobbled ourselves in not moving
forward with more advanced technology. In a way, we have made
ourselves a parody of our own success, staying locked into 1960s
technology while we have created the technology for the twenty-first
century. The ITU and IEEE have progressed to PDF and other formats,
partly because they still view paper as the primary medium.
I don't know whether this issue was covered in the TechSpec BoF
(http://www3.ietf.org/proceedings/05nov/agenda/techspec.txt) but it
definitely needs attention. Perhaps this should be a separate thread
in the discussions about publications.
Steve
Steve Crocker
steve(_at_)shinkuro(_dot_)com
_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
Ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf