Second, your assumption that other SDOs have been able to blissfully make
use
of private formats like MS Word without incident is simply untrue. One
obvious
counterexample I know of is the CCITT/ITU, which has in the past used MS
Word
as a distribution format for many of it's documents. I have quite a few of
these documents on hand and occasionally need to refer to old versions of
them,
but when I try and read them using modern tools the results are rarely good.
Many of these documents simply refuse to open, sometimes crashing the tool
I'm
using, while others do open but are misformatted, sometimes to the point of
being illegible.
[YJS] I think that something has been lost in the translation here.
Indeed it does: You appear to be unfamiliar with the specifics of your own
proposal, which quite clearly calls for MS Word as both an INPUT and OUTPUT
format.
ITU (I have participated in the ITU-T for many years, and ALWAYS
sent in my contributions in Word) ONLY accepts contributions in Word
and ONLY works on documents in Word (using ITU designed templates).
I don't know and don't particularly care what process the ITU uses for this. My
comments were directed at the notion of using Word as an output format for
RFCs.
However, I note in passing that at least one other person has stated that the
procedure the ITU uses does not, in their opinion, work well at all. I cannot
say I'm surprised by this.
The OUTPUT documents are available in Word and PDF, with PDF
the recommended format (due to Word's bad habit of changing pagination
when using different page sizes, etc). The PDF output should be readable
indefinitely.
That appears to be true today. It wasn't true in the past. Many of the ITU
specifications I have are in Word format only.
The Word format is mainly there for people who may need to work on
updates of the standard (unlike RFCs, ITU Recommendations are updated).
Except when it's the only choice, in which case everyone who wants to
read the thing has to put up with it.
If such a Word doc is unreadable for anyone needing it, the
secretariat has tools to convert it.
I am extremely skeptical that the ITU Secretariat stands ready and willing
to assist any random schlub who comes along with a handful of old
ITU documents they acquired several decades back and can no longer read.
Try CVS or SVN and diff - works for everyone.
Sorry, although I have such toys on my home computer
I am not allowed to install such unsupported SW
on my work computer.
So? As it happens the place where I work has rules severely restricting the use
of various Microsoft products. CVS, SVN and diff, OTOH, are all fully supported
tools in my work environment.
As Russ pointed out, it is no more reasonable to expect you to be swayed by the
vagarities of my workplace than it is for me to give a damn about those of
yours. The intersection of the tools allowed by everyone's workplace is pretty
much guaranteed to be the empty.
In any case, since I've seen not even the slightest hint of any support for
your proposal to adopt proprietary formats for I-Ds and RFCs, it appears that
further discussion is a waste of time. So this will be my final message on this
topic.
Ned
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