On Nov 21, 2005, at 12:54 AM, Julien(_dot_)Maisonneuve(_at_)alcatel(_dot_)com
wrote:
The IETF is probably the ONLY meaningful organisation in the world
that insists on using ascii-only specifications. Any
rationalization of that practise should try to explain why we are
so exceptional before embarking on specious arguments on the
relative merits of writing specs in morse code to improve design
simplicity.
I have various documents more than twenty years old that used the
popular word processors of the day to introduce graphs and charts.
With perhaps the exception of nroff, few of these documents can be
recovered due to the obsolescence of the word processor. At times,
printing a page involves recreating an obsolete operating system's
font libraries. Not everyone has adopted the use of a graphical
outputs, but use simply ASCII as sometimes afforded portable
devices. While perhaps future graphical renderings will adopt
persistent conventions, but will the application that generates the
output still be available?
-Doug
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