In the real world there is no shortage of open document standards.
The point I am making is that if you want to hope to persuade
corporations to make billion dollar plus investments in deployment of
IPv6 you had better make sure that your marketting collateral says
'professional' and 'serious' not 'amateur' and 'dilettante'.
-----Original Message-----
From: Eliot Lear [mailto:lear(_at_)cisco(_dot_)com]
Sent: Wednesday, November 23, 2005 9:15 AM
To: Hallam-Baker, Phillip
Cc: Dave Aronson (re IETF); ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
Subject: Re: ASCII art
In the cart before the horse department Phillip wrote:
But there is a teensy inconsistency in an argument that
goes 'we must
have plaintext for accessibility' then ignores the language and
character set issues as unimportant.
The real reason to change the RFC format is that the IETF needs to
make a visible sign that it is capable of institutional
change. A lot
has happened in the past three years, there has been a significant
turnover in IETF management. The old boys club (and it was mostly
boys) has been largely broken up. The IAB and IESG are now
subject to
de-facto term limits.
Institutions that do not constantly renew and re-invent themselves
become obsolete. The IETF is a technology organization, if its
communications tell the world that it is wedged in the
1960s it will
be very difficult for it to be relevant in the modern
Internet which
has over a billion users.
The IETF is the *Internet* Engineering Task Force not some
document formatting engineering task force. We don't have to
lead with our chins here. If some open standard is accepted
for document processing, I'm happy to use it once it is clear
that it will stand the test of time. I certainly wouldn't
bet the bank on the current OpenDoc standard.
In the meantime I will settle for seeing the IETF reinvent
itself by continuing to produce relevant work in the areas we
claim expertise.
That generally involves lots of ones and zeros on wires,
which can easily be represented and described in English with
ASCII. And if someone wants to translate that ASCII into any
other language, I say "Have at it!" Or... if someone wants
to develop source in any other language and then translate
into English, fine with me as long as we understand that the
English is normative in the end.
Eliot
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