At 15:03 26-08-2008, John C Klensin wrote:
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).
Amplifying John's comments, RFCs written over 25 years ago are still
accessible nowadays as they are in ASCII. Anyone can write tools
without undue cost to read, parse, search and produce documents in
that format. Can we say the same for other document formats widely
used over the last decade?
If PDFs were the formal copy, would the required tools be widely
available to do the above? What about 25 years from now? Vendors
only develop software if there is a market for it. The cost of
maintaining software for IETF use only would be high. One of the
advantages of PDF/A is that it is also used by other market
segments. At least that reduces the likelihood of problems in future
accessing the proposed image file format.
Given that the format currently used for publishing RFCs have
withstood the test of time, any move away from that should be very
carefully considered.
Regards,
-sm
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