--On Monday, 02 January, 2006 11:39 +0200 Yaakov Stein
<yaakov_s@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> And why do all the other SDOs get along with non-ASCII formats?
> On my intranet I have a list of 120+ SDOs in the communications
> and computer-science fields, and although I haven't gone
> through them all (I have asked someone to do so) I haven't
> found another group that uses ASCII files.
>
> If the axiom is so strong, then why doesn't it bother anyone
> else?
At least one of the reasons is that most of those groups are
moving very slowly away from a paper-based mentality and, in
most cases, a charge-for-standards (on paper and surrogates for
paper) mentality. With that combination, a format such as PDF
page images (without extractable text) is acceptable and may
actually be an advantage -- it can be read, printed, and is
guaranteed to reproduce the appearance of the printed page
exactly. Similarly, concerns about proprietary formats with
widely-available "readers" such as MS Word may be less than the
concerns would be if "editable without information loss" were a
requirement.
In many cases, distribution in Word or PDF has been justified as
increasing distribution speed and lowering (printing, postage,
and mailing) costs to the SDO, with no changes in procedures
about how those documents are handled, reviewed, and processed.
The IETF and its predecessors started with, and continues, a
collaborative norm in which the ability of everyone to read,
extract from, and manipulate an online document is vitally
important, in part because we have long believed that materials
and consensus need to be developed on mailing lists, not by
lengthy development meetings and whiteboards followed by
transcription into the next fixed-benchmark version of a
document. I see a number of SDOs moving toward that norm, but
most of them are doing so in baby steps. For several of them, I
would not expect the concept of proprietary formats, and
display-only distributed documents, to survive for very long
once they get to the state of online collaboration and editing
that we have been at for 20 or 30 years.
Finally, there is a longstanding and more or less explicit
decision in the IETF community to keep the costs of
participation as low as possible and, in particular, to not have
costs imposed by the SDO become a bar to effective
participation. It is getting harder --much harder than I
personally considerable-- to participate effectively in the IETF
without ever setting foot in a meeting, but it is still possible
to do so. Against our "minimal required costs" background,
effectively insisting a participant maintain a current version
of a particular operating system on which to run particular
versions of word processing and document presentation software
is a pretty steep cost requirement.
That sensitivity to costs of participation is not as important
to most of the SDOs on my list and, I would assume, on yours.
Instead, their norm is participation or membership fees that, in
many cases, I consider high enough to be barriers, requirements
for meeting attendance. If the minimum entry cost for
participation in SDO X --including membership fees and minimal
meeting attendance costs-- is $5K or $10K or more, then maybe
maintaining even a dedicated machine for dealing with their
documents is a reasonable marginal cost. But, for IETF
participation, it is not.
john
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