Douglas Otis wrote:
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?
This issue of formats is a non-issue for a sizeable organisation like the IETF. It is always possible to migrate endangered formats to more modern versions using the many translation tools available, it just may cost a bit of manpower/money if done in due time, and more if done later. Many other organisations already do so, why would the IETF be exceptional there ? And even then, 20 years ago you could use PostScript documents that are perfectly readable today, just like I expect PDF to stay for a very long time, at least as a readable format.
JM. _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf