Hi Tim,
on 2005-12-02 02:44 Tim Bray said the following:
[snip]
> I will now shut up. It is clearly the case that there is tremendous
> resistance within the IETF to leaving their comfy ASCII enclave.
Following the debate from the sideline till now, it's clear to me that
there are at least a few people who are adamantly against change. I'm
not at all convinced that a large majority feels this way. A poll might
reveal more than the relative proportions of highly engaged people
voicing their views here.
As for the issue itself - no, make that some of the issues...
A lot of people seem to appreciate the html-ized and PDF-ized versions
provided on the tools.ietf.org site, even if the convenience offered
by those are small compared to what could be available if a richer
format was available during document preparation.
Personally, I think we would benefit from
* having the XML format championed by xml2rfc as a common source format
* having support for the complete range of unicode characters for
author attribution in the source format
* having the ability to consistently generate multiple presentation
format from this - including ASCII and UTF-8 text for textual diffs,
html with links for browsing, and pdf for consistent cross-platform
printing.
Regarding the stability of the presentation format, I note that
- A new version of PDF called PDF/A (A for Archive) has recently been
standardized in ISO 19005-1 as an "Electronic document file format for
long-term preservation". This is going to be around for a while.
- HTML 4 is also stable; the latest published version is 4.01 from 1999.
- Text, as has been pointed out, is going to be readable long after other
formats have come and gone. Yes, that's true, but readable doesn't
necessarily mean as easily accessible as other formats. I think we're
already seeing that richer formats is passing text as the format of
choice for most people, and platform support for easy handling of the
different formats is shifting.
However - aren't we lucky! If we have a standardized format (RFC 2629
or revisions thereof) from which we can generate multiple presentation
formats, we could always use it to generate the format-du-jour if it
should come to pass that both PDF/A, HTML 4 and text should be hopelessly
outdated...
Now, the toughest question here is which presentation format should be
normative. I think that something richer than ASCII would be good.
It's not clear to me that there is one obvious choice for which format
it should be. In 1 or 2 years I might say PDF/A if it has enough tool
support, as it's open and free, cross-platform consistent, designed to
be stable and long-term accessible. But I'd consider it only if we have
a common source format from which we can reliably produce other versions
such as HTML for browsing and ASCII/UTF-8 for diffing.
Henrik
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