I am personally skeptical about the value of the this experiment.
I am concerned about the long term viability of this particular
format. (I saw a recent note about a postscript document that
supposedly used only core features of postscript, but still could not
be printed on a modern printer.)
I am also concerned that the document does not specify versions and
features. I understand that people may have trouble knowing what
versions and features of PDF they are using, it is important to
remember that PDF is an active format, and I have seen reports that
suitably arranged PDF can carry content which causes harm.
Another concern is that this increases the work on the RFC
Editor. After performing the editing, and receiving the normative
PDF, the RFC Editor must carefully determine if it actually matches
the agreed text changes. (Let us assume the author was trying in
good faith to do so. Mistakes still get made.) When the PDF was
secondary to the text, this was not as large a concern.
Finally, this experiment will produce a set of RFCs which live
forever with the limitation that those RFCs do not have normative
ASCII. What if we decide that this is a bad idea? How do we fix it?
Yours,
Joel M. Halpern
At 10:56 AM 6/14/2006, The IESG wrote:
The IESG has received a request from an individual submitter to consider the
following document:
- 'Proposed Experiment: Normative Format in Addition to ASCII Text '
<draft-ash-alt-formats-02.txt> as an Experimental RFC
The IESG plans to make a decision in the next few weeks, and solicits
final comments on this action. Please send any comments to the
iesg(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org or ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org mailing lists by
2006-07-12.
The file can be obtained via
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ash-alt-formats-02.txt
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