On Nov 21, 2005, at 12:54 AM, Julien.Maisonneuve@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
The IETF is probably the ONLY meaningful organisation in the world that insists on using ascii-only specifications. Any rationalization of that practise should try to explain why we are so exceptional before embarking on specious arguments on the relative merits of writing specs in morse code to improve design simplicity.
I have various documents more than twenty years old that used the popular word processors of the day to introduce graphs and charts. With perhaps the exception of nroff, few of these documents can be recovered due to the obsolescence of the word processor. At times, printing a page involves recreating an obsolete operating system's font libraries. Not everyone has adopted the use of a graphical outputs, but use simply ASCII as sometimes afforded portable devices. While perhaps future graphical renderings will adopt persistent conventions, but will the application that generates the output still be available?
-Doug _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf