--On Tuesday, 26 August, 2008 16:45 -0400 Russ Housley
<housley(_at_)vigilsec(_dot_)com> wrote:
It has already been done:
http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc97.pdf
PDF is an ISO standard, and the RFC Editor has already set a
precedent by using this format when they are unable to locate
an electronic copy of a very old RFC.
This seems like a fine format to capture images, pictures,
glyphs, and other such things that are difficult to render in
ASCII.
Russ,
We've stuck with ASCII in the last many years because, in
addition to being a very stable and widely-available format, it
is easily accessible to tools that are widely-available and very
simple. Diffs work. Grep works. Nearly mindless regular
expression searches work. Copying text out of one document,
modifying it, and pasting it onto another works, and works
reliably. That list, obviously, goes on. While there are
possible substitutes for each
of those, they are not generally available in free products
(unlike simple creation and rendering of PDF files).
There are actually two types of exceptions to the "ASCII" rule
as the normative form of an RFC. One arises when the authors
can convince the RFC Editor that the document simply would not
make sense without material that cannot reasonably be rendered
into ASCII text or ASCII art. In those cases, it is possible
to publish an RFC with the primary/normative text in Postscript
(and, more recently, PDF). The traditional, and most
important, example of that case is the NTP specs, starting with
RFC 1119. The other is older documents for which no
machine-readable text was available (or there was
machine-readable text in, e.g., NLS) and for which scanning was
the only option for making the documents available. Some of
those were scanned, run through OCR systems, and then carefully
checked to produce ASCII results. For others, the resources
weren't around to do that job so seemed wise to get them online
in some form, even image-facsimile.
While we have assumed that virtually all of the community
(Frank's remarks notwithstanding) can read, render, and, if
needed, print PDF files, more complex operations require tools
that are less readily available (or significantly expensive).
One reason for considering the image file an add-on to the ASCII
one, rather than a replacement, is to leave the base RFC
accessible in all of the traditional ways.
I don't think either of the older PDF-only cases one sets much
of a precedent, at least if we continue to care about such
things as those mentioned above.
john
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