Subject: RE: Alternative formats for IDs

From: "Yaakov Stein" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 5 Jan 2006 07:03:39 +0200

Oh, one more thing.  The most widely-used archival form in use at libraries
I've visited has been written or printed words on paper.  This form has
much going for it -- it can represent any character set humans have ever
used, can contain any diagram, and does not require any special software to
to view or produce.  
 
[YJS] Actually, cuneiform on clay tablets and hieroglyphics on marble stelai
seem to be better than paper if you really want your message to last a
long time.

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From: Frank Ellermann <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 05 Jan 2006 06:51:09 +0100

Yaakov Stein wrote:

> Actually, cuneiform on clay tablets and hieroglyphics on
> marble stelai seem to be better than paper if you really
> want your message to last a long time.

Libraries have books that are several hundred years old,
and they have problems with some only sixty years old books
depending on the quality of the paper.  What medium available
since say 1946 do you have in mind for archives ?  PDF/A is
at most one part of _this_ puzzle.  

Maybe we should use RFC 2070, after all it's "ours", and AFAIK
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML i18n//EN"> would be a
nice challenge for validator.w3.org (testing... STRRRIKE... ;-)

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From: Jeffrey Hutzelman <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 05 Jan 2006 11:44:47 -0500

On Thursday, January 05, 2006 07:03:39 AM +0200 Yaakov Stein 
<[email-masked]> wrote:

> [YJS] Actually, cuneiform on clay tablets and hieroglyphics on marble
> stelai seem to be better than paper if you really want your message to
> last a long time.

I'm not convinced clay is better than paper; marble certainly is.
However, neither is as widely deployed, probably due to the high costs of 
production and distribution.  :-)

-- Jeff