Given that problem statement, a simple solution would be for RFCs to
be able to reference art files archived by the RFC Editor using
format-neutral URLs. Initially, those art files could be GIFs, PNGs,
or PDFs. Years from now, when there are no commonly-available readers
for a particular image type that was used earlier, the RFC Editor of
the time can convert the old images to newer ones.
That seems reasonable to me, too, although I am somewhat more sanguine
about the stability of image formats. In 1992 I wrote a book called
Graphics File Formats, and almost without exception the formats we
described in that book are handled by all of the image tools that
people use today, including GIF, TIFF, PCX, JPEG, and BMP.
If we pick a small set of well-known formats, it'll be decades before
anyone has any trouble reading them. Indeed, the hardest part of
implementing Paul's proposal will be to maintain the institutional
memory that the RFC Editor is supposed to do format translation if the
formats go stale.
R's,
John
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