ietf
[Top] [All Lists]

Re: Plagued by PPTX again

2011-11-17 11:46:56
On 11/17/11 9:17 AM, Robinson Tryon wrote:
On Wed, Nov 16, 2011 at 8:56 PM, Melinda 
Shore<melinda(_dot_)shore(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com>  wrote:
On 11/16/2011 01:45 PM, Christian Huitema wrote:
Just saying, but if we want to ensure that presentations are readable 50
years from now, and do not embed some kind of malicious code, we might stick
to ASCII text, right?
Yes, clearly.

It's hard to know what to say about the suggestion that PowerPoint
is an appropriate archival format, other than maybe it's time for
folks to learn more about archiving.  To be honest it's my impression
that it's just people trying to find some reason - any reason - to
justify their preferred tools.  The notion that current PowerPoint
formats being the ones most likely to be interpretable in 2061, of
the formats now available, really doesn't hold up under serious
scrutiny.

But hey, now we know that at least the proponents of the archival
view are going to have crud-free slides, in the interest of
parsability at unknown future times.

We can certainly hope so!

Melinda

Reviewing this thread, it seems like there are three central desires
regarding IETF materials:

1) Interoperability: Universal access to working content (e.g. reading
presentation slides from a current meeting)
2) Archiving: Storage and search of content
3) Creation: Ease of content creation/desire to use particular products

If the current formats used to produce content (e.g. PPT, PPTX, ODF,
etc...) can be easily and accurately converted into formats such as
PDF/A-1, and if the text from the source formats can be exported (for
search/accessibility purposes), then I think we can make everyone
happy.

The export tools aren't perfect, of course, so this will place a
burden on content creators to either choose a source format that has
good export or to craft their input files so that they can be cleanly
exported by the available software.

If authors take on the responsibility of creating and verifying the
fidelity of exported versions, then I think everything will be peachy.
What can we do to encourage this practice?
Agreed.

PDF/a is something browsers and natively by different OSs that can directly display. When submitting formats that are not PDF/a, convert and automatically link to the converted output with a prompt requesting approval.

http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/formats/fdd/fdd000125.shtml

-Doug

_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
Ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf

<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>