Re: Alternative formats for IDs

Dear Noel et al;

I trust that the whole IETF community  will have a Happy New Year.

On Jan 2, 2006, at 3:24 PM, Noel Chiappa wrote:

> > From: John C Klensin <john-ietf(_at_)jck(_dot_)com>
> > the state of online collaboration and editing that we have been at  
> > for
> > 20 or 30 years.
> > Finally, there is a longstanding and more or less explicit  
> > decision in
> > the IETF community to keep the costs of participation as low as  
> > possible
> There's one other thing, also tied to the IETF (and its  
> predecessor's) long
> existence, which is the long-term accessability of online documents  
> - again,
> another facet in which our experience is pretty unique. Is MS-Word (or
> anything else) going to be 30 years from now?
>
> In case you think this is a silly question, I just recently  
> finished scanning
> / OCR'ing / proofing the oft-cited IEN-19 (Shoch, "Inter-Network  
> Naming,
> Addressing, and Routing"), from January 1978 - 28 years ago. The  
> original of
> this document was presumably in some Bravo format, and the printing  
> version
> was in PRESS - and I somehow doubt either is supported anywhere in  
> the world
> now. I only had a hardcopy, so the question's a bit moot, but I  
> very much
> doubt a machine-readable version of either form would have done me  
> much good.
"Don't re-invent the wheel" is I think generally a good engineering  
principle. In this case, there
are a number of entities that are interested in long term archival   
storage of electronic documents; I think that the IETF should use   
their expertise and experience.
It seems that the library community has settled on PDF as its long  
term storage choice, and  is
moving to standardize this.

From Harvard University's Report to the Digital Library Federation,  
October, 2004 :
http://www.diglib.org/pubs/news05_01/harvardnews5.htm

PDF/A

Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF) has become the de-facto  
standard for web-based delivery of electronic documents. The  
International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has initiated an  
effort to create an standard for an archival profile of PDF that is  
amendable for long-term preservation. This standard, PDF/A, is  
intended to provide an unambiguous definition of the requirements  
necessary for the reliable and predictable future rendering of  
archived PDF documents. The second draft of the PDF/A standard was  
released in May 2004 and is currently undergoing a comment period by  
experts from the constituent national bodies of ISO. Stephen Abrams,  
the LDI Digital Library Program Manager at Harvard University, is the  
project leader and document editor for the ISO PDF/A joint working  
group.
-----

The next ISO meeting  on this is january 25-26 in Berlin, Germany

http://www.aiim.org/standards.asp?ID=25013

Here is the PR announcing the  project :

 A new joint activity has been initiated between NPES The  
Association for Suppliers of
Printing, Publishing and Converting Technologies, and the Association  
for Information and Image
Management, International (AIIM International) to develop an  
International standard that defines the
use of the Portable Document Format (PDF) for archiving and  
preserving documents.
 The project, currently referred to as PDF/A, will address the  
growing need to electronically
archive documents in a way that will ensure preservation of their  
contents over an extended period of
time, and will further ensure that those documents will be able to be  
retrieved and rendered with a
consistent and predictable result in the future.  This need exists in  
a growing number of international
government and industry segments, including legal systems, libraries,  
newspapers, regulated
industries, and others.

 The work will address the use of PDF for multi-page documents that  
may contain a mixture of
text, raster images and vector graphics.  It will also address the  
features and requirements that must be
supported by reading devices that will be used to retrieve and render  
the archived documents.
 This joint committee formed under AIIM and NPES will identify  
issues to be addressed, as
well as proposed solutions, and will develop a draft document that  
will then be presented to a Joint
Working Group of the International Organization for Standardization  
(ISO) for development and
approval as an International Standard.

-----
The Library of Congress has set up a web site devoted to this issue,
http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/ ,
which lists all of the formats being considered at

http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/formats/fdd/descriptions.shtml

and the ones specifically for text at
http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/formats/fdd/text_fdd.shtml

these being

DTB, Digital Talking Book
OEBPS_1_0, Open eBook Forum Publication Structure 1.0.1
OEBPS_1_2, Open eBook Forum Publication Structure 1.2
NCBIArch_1, NCBI/NLM Journal Archiving and Interchange DTD, version 1
NITF, News Industry Text Format

PDF, Portable Document Format
PDF_1_4, PDF, Versions 1.0-1.4
PDF_1_5, PDF, Version 1.5
PDF/A, PDF for Preservation
PDF/X, PDF for Prepress Graphics File Interchange

XML

with PDF/A  being further described at : http:// 
www.digitalpreservation.gov/formats/fdd/fdd000125.shtml
(Note : There is of course wording that says that "Inclusion of a  
format does not imply that it is preferred or acceptable for Library  
of Congress collections. Conversely, omission of a format from the  
list does not imply that it is not preferred or acceptable.  
Descriptions will be drafted and added over time.")
-----

My personal conclusion is

- I am in favor of moving beyond ASCII only.
- I am against using any non-standardized format, such as Word
- If there was a proposal to use PDF/A as standardized, I would  
support it.
Regards
Marshall Eubanks


> ASCII may be pretty lobotomized, but it *is* timeless.
>
> (Not that I'm per-se against allowing more powerful forms, mind,  
> but any
> proprietary option is just not viable, IMO.)
>
>         Noel
>
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