--On Tuesday, 26 August, 2008 16:45 -0400 Russ Housley <housley@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > It has already been done: > http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc97.pdf > > PDF is an ISO standard, and the RFC Editor has already set a > precedent by using this format when they are unable to locate > an electronic copy of a very old RFC. > > This seems like a fine format to capture images, pictures, > glyphs, and other such things that are difficult to render in > ASCII. Russ, We've stuck with ASCII in the last many years because, in addition to being a very stable and widely-available format, it is easily accessible to tools that are widely-available and very simple. Diffs work. Grep works. Nearly mindless regular expression searches work. Copying text out of one document, modifying it, and pasting it onto another works, and works reliably. That list, obviously, goes on. While there are possible substitutes for each of those, they are not generally available in free products (unlike simple creation and rendering of PDF files). There are actually two types of exceptions to the "ASCII" rule as the normative form of an RFC. One arises when the authors can convince the RFC Editor that the document simply would not make sense without material that cannot reasonably be rendered into ASCII text or ASCII art. In those cases, it is possible to publish an RFC with the primary/normative text in Postscript (and, more recently, PDF). The traditional, and most important, example of that case is the NTP specs, starting with RFC 1119. The other is older documents for which no machine-readable text was available (or there was machine-readable text in, e.g., NLS) and for which scanning was the only option for making the documents available. Some of those were scanned, run through OCR systems, and then carefully checked to produce ASCII results. For others, the resources weren't around to do that job so seemed wise to get them online in some form, even image-facsimile. While we have assumed that virtually all of the community (Frank's remarks notwithstanding) can read, render, and, if needed, print PDF files, more complex operations require tools that are less readily available (or significantly expensive). One reason for considering the image file an add-on to the ASCII one, rather than a replacement, is to leave the base RFC accessible in all of the traditional ways. I don't think either of the older PDF-only cases one sets much of a precedent, at least if we continue to care about such things as those mentioned above. john _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf