On 18-jun-2006, at 13:23, Hallam-Baker, Phillip wrote:
Show me a PDF viewer written by a 16-year-old in BASIC, or
whatever it is that bored kids write software in these days.
I am more concerned about making a document readable and
intelligible by a 16 year old doing a high school class than the
somewhat bizare notion of them writing text editors for use by
people writing them.
It's not _that_ bizarre. Suppose that we decide to allow publishing
RFCs in PDF only. Suppose that within the next few years some company
comes up with a replacement for PDF that is better is some important
regard so that everyone switches to the new format. Suppose that a
decade later, someone wants to read one of those RFCs that is only
available in PDF. At that point, it will be extremely hard to do
that, because all the new software doesn't support PDF anymore, or in
a way that's too limited to be useful. Using old software that with
good PDF support isn't an option either, because very little software
still runs after a decade or so of OS updates. And writing a PDF
viewer just for this isn't really an option either, while writing a
viewer or even editor that can handle today's RFC format is.
The steps required to format an RFC nicely are far from trivial.
It's simple enough, it just takes a lot of effort without good tools.
But I'm still not sure what problem exactly we're trying to solve.
_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
Ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf