Douglas Otis wrote:
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?
This issue of formats is a non-issue for a sizeable organisation like
the IETF. It is always possible to migrate endangered formats to more
modern versions using the many translation tools available, it just may
cost a bit of manpower/money if done in due time, and more if done
later. Many other organisations already do so, why would the IETF be
exceptional there ?
And even then, 20 years ago you could use PostScript documents that are
perfectly readable today, just like I expect PDF to stay for a very long
time, at least as a readable format.
JM.
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