The fact that file formats may become obsolete and unreadable 20 years later is a crucially important for IETF continuity. I remember seeing a cartoon a few years ago showing an email from Gates to Judge Jackson stating that the latter's court decision was in an old format of Word and hence unreadable, and further suggesting that the Judge upgrade. Unfortunately, I find that even ASCII files exact a price. I find that I can usually not print an ID directly from my browser as the lines become broken (due to the default font being too large), and the text hard to read. Nor should I print directly from my word processor as it adds a blank page between every two pages and occasionally places the footer on a page by itself. Sometimes I cut and paste into Word, but then the margins come out wrong, and ASCII tables containing +-+-+- strings become strangely augmented with unprintable characters. So I usually end up having to cut and paste into a "programmer's editor", checking manually that the page breaks are OK (usually fixing a few) and only then printing. Admittedly this is not too time consuming, but it shows that commercial tools are not optimized for our ASCII format, and I wonder if I will be still be able to print at all in a few years time. Y(J)S _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf