On Wed, Nov 16, 2011 at 8:56 PM, Melinda Shore <melinda.shore@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On 11/16/2011 01:45 PM, Christian Huitema wrote: >> >> Just saying, but if we want to ensure that presentations are readable 50 >> years from now, and do not embed some kind of malicious code, we might stick >> to ASCII text, right? > > Yes, clearly. > > It's hard to know what to say about the suggestion that PowerPoint > is an appropriate archival format, other than maybe it's time for > folks to learn more about archiving. To be honest it's my impression > that it's just people trying to find some reason - any reason - to > justify their preferred tools. The notion that current PowerPoint > formats being the ones most likely to be interpretable in 2061, of > the formats now available, really doesn't hold up under serious > scrutiny. > > But hey, now we know that at least the proponents of the archival > view are going to have crud-free slides, in the interest of > parsability at unknown future times. > We can certainly hope so! > > Melinda > Reviewing this thread, it seems like there are three central desires regarding IETF materials: 1) Interoperability: Universal access to working content (e.g. reading presentation slides from a current meeting) 2) Archiving: Storage and search of content 3) Creation: Ease of content creation/desire to use particular products If the current formats used to produce content (e.g. PPT, PPTX, ODF, etc...) can be easily and accurately converted into formats such as PDF/A-1, and if the text from the source formats can be exported (for search/accessibility purposes), then I think we can make everyone happy. The export tools aren't perfect, of course, so this will place a burden on content creators to either choose a source format that has good export or to craft their input files so that they can be cleanly exported by the available software. If authors take on the responsibility of creating and verifying the fidelity of exported versions, then I think everything will be peachy. What can we do to encourage this practice? -- Robinson _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf