Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:
On 18-jun-2006, at 16:20, Hallam-Baker, Phillip wrote:
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.
And suppose some Vogons came along and demolished the planet to make
way for a hyperspace bypass.
There is a slight difference here: the earth hasn't seen any successful
demolishion attempts in the last 4.5 billion years, while nearly any
word processing document format from the 1990s can't be read properly.
That is true. I remember too very well the battle between Word, Winword
and Wordstar. It was vi who finally won. Vi is compatible with edlin and ed.
And then the virus terror. Attachments to email, word-files and pdf-files
were prohibited because of virus and trojan threats.
In many cases the text itself can be retrieved but there is almost
always loss of some or even all formatting. I gather that the current
version of Word can't read documents made by all previous versions of
itself successfully.
The idea that any of the formats being discussed will become
impossible to read is silly. There are billions of HTML document and
hundreds of millions of PDFs
I can read some PDFs on one of my linux boxes. Many PDFs complain and
coredump. The other boxes can display ASCII only because they cannot
run X.
Of course it will not be impossible to read. But there is a big
difference between being able to have copies of all published RFCs on
local storage (another issue with PDF: the files are many orders of
magnitude larger) that are searchable with widely available tools and
having to enlist specialist help to extract the desired information.
I'm convinced that the success of the TCP/IP and web families of
standards has a great deal to do with the fact that the standards
documents involved are freely and easily available.
The output of the IETF is simply not that critical for this level of
concern to be warranted. RFCs are exactly that, requests for comment.
Yes that is true, the IETF was not asked about lanmanager and netbios.
That is 99% of all local network traffic and it cannot even access the
internet. (In case you dont believe it, look for the broadcast packets)
Go ask the people at the company you work for how important they think
their GTLD servers are, and how critical RFCs 791, 768 and 1035 (to
name a few old ones) are for their continued operation.
The real standards are and will always be set by running code.
All machines I am running BIND 9.4.0a6 on, cannot view PDFs. I guess
BIND is a standard and 9.4.0a6 is very state of the art.
And Karins washing machine and the refrigerateur cannot read PDFs
either also they are IPv6 enabled :)
This is so absurd that I don't even know what to say.
agreed.
Without continued maintenance the value of standards is quickly lost
in any case. RFC 822 has long since ceased to be the Internet email
standard, it is of historic interest only. The same is close to being
the case for RFC 2822 as well.
In emails there is only one standard PLAIN ASCII, NO ATTACHMENTS
or the virus killer will eat it.
Except you are working for nintendo or a spammer.
That's nice. But I doubt you're going to be able to read that email
message exchanged through the latest version of the SMTP protocol
without some support for RFC 894 along the way.
Interestingly enough, I have just seen a little unicode example.
I could not see the graphics, but when my email was replyed it
became almost visible.
The underlying fallacy here is that the documents are holy
scriptures, they are not, they are merely an engineering tool to
effect an engineering outcome.
They are holy scriptures or there would be not internet.
There would be lot of isolated LANs, some interconnected others not,
depending on the manufacturer.
Talk about what may happen in fifty or a hundred years time is simply
an ego trip. Its like those folk who in the dotcom boom took out
million dollar key man insurance. It had nothing to do with the
damage that might be done to the company if they died unexpectedly it
was a pure ego trip from start to finish.
I remember what my boss told me in the 1970th when he tried to read a
word document with wordstar. He was right. Nobody can read those
documents today, not on the apple nor on windows.
The wordstar is still a pain in - you know where. But I can still
read them and clean them with vi.
That is only some 30 years. The documents are still of interest.
Today they are plain EBCDIC and on punched cards.
We have them plain ASCII and on papertape too.
Of course we have them on CDROM but we dont have them on PDF.
It's the other way around. Time and time again, when an engineer
thought "well, by that time surely the system will be replaced" this
turned out to be a mistake. Is Y2K really that long ago that we don't
remember that lesson?
By the way: I happened to see a documentary on sky scrapers on the BBC
the other night. I was surprised to see that the Woolworth building in
New York (built in 1913) still has the original elevator machinary in
operation. It would suck to have to replace a bunch of elevators
because you don't have the documentation to prove that they're still up
to code...
The voyager spacecrafts were launched 1977. They are still alive and they
are the only spacecrafts we have out there. There wont be any others the
next 29 years. It would be a shame if we could not read the documentation
today. There are still programmers working on the software to capture the
data comming in. If those documents where in ... No, I dont think word
existed at that time. That is why the documentation was EBCDIC and
punched cards :)
--
Peter and Karin Dambier
Cesidian Root - Radice Cesidiana
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D-64646 Heppenheim
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mail: peter(_at_)peter-dambier(_dot_)de
mail: peter(_at_)echnaton(_dot_)serveftp(_dot_)com
http://iason.site.voila.fr/
https://sourceforge.net/projects/iason/
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