On Nov 14, 2005, at 8:56 AM, Stewart Bryant wrote:
<snip> BTW - one carrot that would tempt me away would be if the result allowed the normative text to incorprate proper diagrams - like ITU and IEEE - two name but two - have use in their specifications for the last 20 or so years.
The issue of diagrams is entangled in the long-standing discussion of proprietary formats. There is a huge benefit in having a format that *everyone* can access without difficulty or cost. I can't begin to tell you the impact I felt when I walked into a university half way around the world in an underdeveloped country and had a graduate student show me some pretty sophisticated stuff he had done based on RFCs he had downloaded from the net. ASCII is an enormous advantage from that respect.
At the same time, we have clearly hobbled ourselves in not moving forward with more advanced technology. In a way, we have made ourselves a parody of our own success, staying locked into 1960s technology while we have created the technology for the twenty-first century. The ITU and IEEE have progressed to PDF and other formats, partly because they still view paper as the primary medium.
I don't know whether this issue was covered in the TechSpec BoF (http://www3.ietf.org/proceedings/05nov/agenda/techspec.txt) but it definitely needs attention. Perhaps this should be a separate thread in the discussions about publications.
Steve Steve Crocker steve@xxxxxxxxxxxx _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf