Hi,
As a MIB Doctor and chair of the Bridge WG, I have been working with
the IEEE 802.1 WG, who will assume maintenance responsiblities for the
Bridge WG Mib modules.
IEEE 802.1 publishes their standards in PDF. We had to make a special
request that they make the MIB portion of their documents available in
ASCII format, partly so, as part of the transition process, IETF MIB
Doctors could review their documents (e.g., running the MIB module
through smilint and other compilers), but also so the MIB modules
could be extracted for importing into network management applications,
such as NET-SNMP and HP OvenView.
A similar issue will exist for documents that contain code snippets.
While I personally like PDF for many things, I find PDF to be a poor
choice for IETF works-in-progress, or even for RFCs because they lack
many of the characteristics that ASCII files offer.
David Harrington
dbharrington(_at_)comcast(_dot_)net
-----Original Message-----
From: ietf-bounces(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
[mailto:ietf-bounces(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org] On
Behalf Of John C Klensin
Sent: Monday, January 02, 2006 3:37 PM
To: Marshall Eubanks
Cc: ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
Subject: Re: Alternative formats for IDs
Marshall,
--On Monday, 02 January, 2006 16:03 -0500 Marshall Eubanks
<tme(_at_)multicasttech(_dot_)com> wrote:
...
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.
^^^^^^
Emphasis added, of course.
As I have understood it, PDF/A is intended as an archival format
for the sorts of documents that exist on paper, with a primary
goal of being able to render things that look just like the
paper looked like. It has not been a requirement that PDF/A
support extraction of text, editing, insertion of new materials,
and other forms of markup. Indeed, some of the participants in
the PDF/A effort might consider support for some of those things
to be liabilities. Your note reinforces that impression.
As such, it is (IMO, barely) possible that PDF/A would be a
reasonable format for storing archival documents such as RFCs.
But it would be a terrible format for working documents such as
I-Ds, for the reasons discussed in my earlier note.
john
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