This draft addresses none of the problems identified the last time it
came around, and I strongly encourage the IESG to say no.
Although I sympathize with the concern that some RFCs would work
better with fancier graphics, "PDF" isn't a solution to any problem I
understand.
Most importantly, PDF is not one format, it is a family of formats,
and it is all too common to find "PDF" documents that do not display
properly, most often because they depend on non-standard fonts, but
sometimes because they depend on features not found in all PDF viewers
or printers. I see that librarians who are concerned about archival
documents have defined a profile called PDF/A intended for documents
with long lifetimes that should work reliably. But I don't know any
more about it than that, and in particular I don't know what tools are
available to produce PDF/A or to verify that a purported PDF document
is indeed compliant with PDF/A.
Since the main concern in this draft is that RFCs need better
graphics, I would suggest that a simple solution would be to permit
ASCII drafts to have accompanying illustrations in a well standardized
graphic file format such as GIF (which I think is now out of patent
everywhere) or PNG. That would require little change to the editorial
process.
Finally, I have to say that some of the concerns in this draft are
just silly, notably the complaint that ASCII documents look lousy when
loaded into Microsoft Word and printed. It's true, but if you think
ASCII documents look bad in Word, try loading a PDF into Word and
printing that. If someone is using a Windows system, the Notepad
program included with all versions of Windows can load and print ASCII
files quite nicely.
So anyway, please do not conduct this experiment. If we agree that
better graphics are important, there are simpler and less risky ways
to accomodate them.
Regards,
John Levine, johnl(_at_)iecc(_dot_)com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet
for Dummies",
Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://www.johnlevine.com, Mayor
"More Wiener schnitzel, please", said Tom, revealingly.
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
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