At 15:03 26-08-2008, John C Klensin wrote: >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). Amplifying John's comments, RFCs written over 25 years ago are still accessible nowadays as they are in ASCII. Anyone can write tools without undue cost to read, parse, search and produce documents in that format. Can we say the same for other document formats widely used over the last decade? If PDFs were the formal copy, would the required tools be widely available to do the above? What about 25 years from now? Vendors only develop software if there is a market for it. The cost of maintaining software for IETF use only would be high. One of the advantages of PDF/A is that it is also used by other market segments. At least that reduces the likelihood of problems in future accessing the proposed image file format. Given that the format currently used for publishing RFCs have withstood the test of time, any move away from that should be very carefully considered. Regards, -sm _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf