Re: Last Call: 'Proposed Experiment: Normative Format in Addition to ASC

John Levine wrote:
> 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.
If we're talking about line drawings, an object format is more useful
than a bitmap such as GIF or PNG. However, like Bob, I don't see the
format as the issue, but often the illustrator. It's possible to write
poor text and draw poor pictures in ASCII and PDF.

The key question is whether there exists a format which is likely to be
sufficiently stable that we won't have to revisit this decision in
another 35 years. All the proposed formats - including PDF, XML, etc. -
are moving targets at this time.

Joe

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