On 15/11/2011 22:30, Melinda Shore wrote: > Librarian, here. As a fan of the unusual argument I love the > suggestion that future researchers will have an easier time with > undocumented, proprietary formats, and therefore in the present > day we should all be required to run behemothware so that we can > be able to look at slides loaded with the sort of Features that > Tufte warned us about. Odd to see an IETF participant arguing > against interoperability, BTW. That sort of sarcasm has a tendency not to work out in the longer run. Oh wait, didn't someone else say that already? :-) In fact, I deleted a paragraph that I had written about accepting multiple formats and converting everything into a common format, simply because the IETF does that already with pdf. Possibly deleting this didn't help the email context. My point was merely that no file format is ideal: ascii7 has elegant simplicity but hobbles presentation format style. PDF is widely supported, and I am informed that PDF/A is considered suitable for long-term preservation (thanks R.P. for pointing this out offline). However, pdf is a monstrous bag of horrors internally and forensic historians of the future will not necessarily love us for it, particularly if they are picking apart corrupted pdfs with some of the more exotic constructions. Full documentation is available for Microsoft doc/docx/ppt/pptx formats, regardless of your assertion that these are undocumented - and the xml versions are slightly less godawful than the binary formats. ODF is documented badly enough to the extent that incompatible but compliant versions exist. Take your pick. FWIW, my preference would be to accept current common formats on the datatracker, including pptx/docx/etc, to convert them immediately to some form of lowest common denominator (e.g. pdf, with all the information loss that that entails) and then to post the original format for current consumption, the converted format for posterity, and if possible a text format version. But that's more work than the (reasonable) current ietf position of just publishing PDFs. Re: Tufte, I often wonder if he doesn't have a feline mass grave in his back yard for all the stultifyingly awful ppts imposed upon bored audiences over the years. Nick _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf