This draft addresses none of the problems identified the last time it came around, and I strongly encourage the IESG to say no. Although I sympathize with the concern that some RFCs would work better with fancier graphics, "PDF" isn't a solution to any problem I understand. Most importantly, PDF is not one format, it is a family of formats, and it is all too common to find "PDF" documents that do not display properly, most often because they depend on non-standard fonts, but sometimes because they depend on features not found in all PDF viewers or printers. I see that librarians who are concerned about archival documents have defined a profile called PDF/A intended for documents with long lifetimes that should work reliably. But I don't know any more about it than that, and in particular I don't know what tools are available to produce PDF/A or to verify that a purported PDF document is indeed compliant with PDF/A. Since the main concern in this draft is that RFCs need better graphics, I would suggest that a simple solution would be to permit ASCII drafts to have accompanying illustrations in a well standardized graphic file format such as GIF (which I think is now out of patent everywhere) or PNG. That would require little change to the editorial process. Finally, I have to say that some of the concerns in this draft are just silly, notably the complaint that ASCII documents look lousy when loaded into Microsoft Word and printed. It's true, but if you think ASCII documents look bad in Word, try loading a PDF into Word and printing that. If someone is using a Windows system, the Notepad program included with all versions of Windows can load and print ASCII files quite nicely. So anyway, please do not conduct this experiment. If we agree that better graphics are important, there are simpler and less risky ways to accomodate them. Regards, John Levine, johnl@xxxxxxxx, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://www.johnlevine.com, Mayor "More Wiener schnitzel, please", said Tom, revealingly. >>The IESG has received a request from an individual submitter to consider the >>following document: >> >>- 'Proposed Experiment: Normative Format in Addition to ASCII Text ' >> <draft-ash-alt-formats-02.txt> as an Experimental RFC _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf