Yaakov Stein wrote:
> We suggested taking a show of hands amongst the thousands
> who read IDs and RFC, and not only among the five or so very
> vocal people who respond to emails on the IETF general
> list within 5 minutes (even on January first) .
I read it the day before yesterday, so that "5 minutes" took
me only an hour after finding your pointer here, including
the time to lookup 3285.
> There are free viewers for both of these formats for every
> operating system imaginable, and all popular web browsers
> have integral support or a free an add-on.
I've never heard of a Word viewer for OS/2. Something with
your "every", "many", "virtually all", "all popular", "five
minutes" and so on doesn't work. No problem in a flamewar,
but for an April 1st RFC this could give it away too soon.
> I guess there may be a few people who write their own OS
> and browsers and only read ASCII format. Perhaps we can
> assume that these two or three people left who can read
> neither Word nor PDF can read HTML with embedded gifs, and
> suppy a converter to that format?
Yes, that's AFAIK somewhere near File -> Save As in Word XP
(no idea about earlier versions). If "two or three" covers
most mobile devices (one), pre-W2K (?) users without Office
(two), and me (three) that HTML conversion should help.
> Was the issue of a security section a substantive one or a
> nit-picking one?
If you're not sure check out the security considerations in
RFC 3285, Listing some relevant "Vulnerability Notes" could
do the trick. Maybe mention that it's often not possible to
send Word documents in mail, it won't survive many filters.
> please explain how reading IDs in PDF is more of a security
> risk than reading the ASCII version in a browser.
Nothing I said was about PDF, I'm talking about MS Word. Some
PDF "colorspace N not found" or "cannot extract embedded font"
issues are no security risk from my AcroReader 3 POV. I've
read that they plan to introduce a monthly patch day for actual
versions of their reader.
[enumeration of "virtually all other SDOs" consisting of
"ITU-T, MFA, and many other SDOs"]
> it is just to point out that any IETF participant who
> participates works in ANY other SDO (or works in ANY
> company, or reads data-sheets or white-papers from ANY
> company, or ...) has the ability to read either Word or PDF.
I've certainly never seen many W3C documents. The ECMA CDs
were PDF, Most of the time I get away with "if it's neither
ASCII nor (X)HTML ignore it". Proprietary and other formats
come and go, ASCII stays. nroff, troff, TeX, texinfo, ps,
MS quickhelp, OS/2 inf, etc. The oldest format I recall was
something for VM/CMS. Now we have wiki and atom. <shrug />
Bye, Frank
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