From: Noel Chiappa [mailto:jnc(_at_)mercury(_dot_)lcs(_dot_)mit(_dot_)edu]
> From: "Hallam-Baker, Phillip" <pbaker(_at_)verisign(_dot_)com>
> Why go to all that trouble to create infrastructure to
support an
> obsolete document format when we can get all the infrastructure
> required to support a modern, open format
Because those of us who've been around for a while have been
repeatedly screwed when something that was, at one time, the
latest and greatest "modern, open format" turns out, N years
later, to no longer be supported.
Do you fear that the world's desire to hear the pearls of wisdom of the IETF
will be any less than for Tim's team?
This problem is precisely the reason why standards exist for HTML.
Congress has its archives kept in SGML, the Oxford English Dictionary is in
HTML.
Unless there is a major catastrophe that wipes out enough human life that the
Internet ceases to be viable in any case there is absolutely no possibility
that the ability to read legacy HTML formats will be lost.
Congress and other world governments have committed billions worth of documents
to digital archives.
It could be that the IETF has got this right and everyone else including the
professionals in the document archiving business have got it right.
But the probability is overwhelmingly that the reverse is the case.
And if the professionals have perchance got it wrong more billions will be
available to fix their mess.
All it takes to ensure that the IETF XHTML corpus is compliant with the latest
version is to run a perl script once a decade.
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