Subject: RE: I-D ACTION:draft-ash-alt-formats-01.txt

From: "Ash, Gerald R \(Jerry\), ALABS" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 31 Jan 2006 10:29:28 -0600

Hi All,

As a follow-up to our recent discussion, please review the draft at
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ash-alt-formats-01.txt,
.pdf version available at
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ash-alt-formats-01.pdf.

We propose an experiment based on RFC 3933 allowing, in addition to
ASCII text as a normative input/output format, PDF as an additional
normative output format.

We look forward to your comments and suggestions.

Thanks,
Regards,
Jerry, Stewart, Yaakov

-----Original Message-----
From: [email-masked]
[mailto:[email-masked]] On Behalf Of
[email-masked]
Sent: Tuesday, January 31, 2006 10:50 AM
To: [email-masked]
Subject: I-D ACTION:draft-ash-alt-formats-01.txt 

A New Internet-Draft is available from the on-line Internet-Drafts
directories.

	Title		: Proposed Experiment: Normative Format in
Addition to ASCII Text
	Author(s)	: J. Ash, et al.
	Filename	: draft-ash-alt-formats-01.txt,.pdf
	Pages		: 8
	Date		: 2006-1-31
	
Following RFC 3933, the authors propose an experiment allowing, in
   addition to ASCII text as a normative input/output format, PDF as an
   additional normative output format.

A URL for this Internet-Draft is:
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ash-alt-formats-01.txt

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---

From: Sam Hartman <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 31 Jan 2006 14:08:07 -0500

How far along are you in getting representatives of the interesting
stakeholders involved?

Have you found a WG/document/something that would benefit from the
experiment?  Have you found an AD who would be willing to work with
this experiment?  Have you found someone from the rfc-editor who is
interested in participating?

---

From: John Levine <[email-masked]>
Date: 31 Jan 2006 20:05:04 -0000

>ASCII text as a normative input/output format, PDF as an additional

There are a lot of different formats called PDF.  There are PDF 1.1,
1.2, 1.3, and 1.4.  There's the new PDF/A archival profile along with
a variety of other industry-specific PDF/x profiles .  And there are a
whole lot of files produced by alleged PDF generators that don't
actually conform to any version of the PDF spec.  (Often they depend
on non-standard fonts that happened to be installed on the author's
computer.)

Among valid PDFs, do you include PDFs that are coded to prohibit text
extraction?  How about PDFs that are just bitmap scans of printed
documents, like the PDF versions of some early RFCs from the 1970s?

As we all know, one of the reasons that ASCII text has stood the test
of time is that its definition is stable and well-understood, so it is
at no risk of becoming unreadable due to losing the programs needed to
decode it.  I think that PDF/A may be well enough defined to be an
adequate archival format, but just "PDF" is way too vague.

R's,
John

---

From: Frank Ellermann <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 31 Jan 2006 22:32:14 +0100

> http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ash-alt-formats-01.pdf.

My AcroReader 3 says "Colorspace "csfi" konnte nicht gefunden
werden" (cannot find colourspace 'csfi' or similar).  Then it
gave me the option to ignore further errors, I confirmed this.

Sure like hell the one thing I don't see are the two important
non-ASCII-art versions of the example figures on (PDF) pages 5
and 7.

Many of those in support of PDF said that the experiment has to
identify a minimal subset of required features.  Whatever this
might be, "colourspace 'csfi'" (or similar) isn't a part of it.

> We look forward to your comments and suggestions.

Maybe use OpenOffice to create the PDF, so far that apparaently
always worked from my POV.  Specify which PDF features you want
to allow.  Make sure that "csfi" (or similar) isn't a part of
this minimal subset.

Consider a maximum size, your text/plain has about 18 KB, the
PDF has 113 (?) KB.  Above 1 MB I'd simply refuse to download
it.  Unless I desperately want it or somebody tells me that it
should work against all odds.
                               Bye, Frank

---

From: "Joel M. Halpern" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 31 Jan 2006 18:16:27 -0500

Aside from the issues already raised on the list, I see some other problems.

First and foremost, if the input format is PDF, how will the RFC Editor 
edit the document?  PDF documents are not editable.

Secondarily, as a lesser matter, for the WG / Documents that get selected 
for the experiment, can you indicate what composition tools (editors) are 
likely to be suitable for producing this?  Are we going to be requiring 
that the document editors for those documents have and use word?  (Or Open 
Doc, or ...)  Or are we expecting them to find their own tools to 
participate in the experiment?

Thirdly, it would probably be a good idea to have greater clarity on 
judging success.  If the WG loved it, and the IETF list is divided, and ... 
which condition is most important, and why?  Given that the impact of this 
experiment is quite broad, I think that clarity on the judgement is important.

Yours,
Joel M. Halpern

---

From: "Anthony G. Atkielski" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 1 Feb 2006 02:49:02 +0100

> documents, like the PDF versions of some early RFCs from the 1970s?

Use the most conservative (and thus probably the earliest) version of
PDF.  Later versions are designed mostly to make money for Adobe, and
they are scarcely needed for documents that contain only formatted
text and diagrams.  Using an early version of PDF also guarantees that
the document can be opened with (almost?) any version of Acrobat
Reader or other software.

I still use Acrobat 4.x, and I have it set to generate Acrobat 3.x
documents, and I've yet to generate any document that requires a more
recent version of the software.  If you limit yourself to the text and
simple artwork that has sufficed for the printed page for the past few
centuries, you don't need anything more recent, and you shouldn't be
using anything more recent.

Be conservative in what you require, and liberal in what you accept.

---

From: "Anthony G. Atkielski" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 1 Feb 2006 02:57:14 +0100

> edit the document?  PDF documents are not editable.

PDF is designed to be uneditable.  It's for final versions of a
document, and the difficulty involved in trying to edit it is one of
its most useful features.

If the document isn't acceptable as-is, then it should be rejected
until the author makes any required changes.

I'm not saying that PDF is or isn't the right format, but I can say
that PDF seems like the least of several evils when it comes to
encoding line art in a document.  If you have to go beyond ASCII text,
PDF is the next step up.  It's certainly better than RTF, or Word
format.  And it is so thoroughly entrenched these days that it has a
good chance of surviving over the long term, whereas many other
formats do not.

Also, at least early versions of PDF cannot easily carry viruses;
later versions are perhaps best avoided because of this risk.

> participate in the experiment?

There are lots of ways to generate PDF.  An additional option is to
offer PDF generation from text or other formats.  PDF is a good
archive format for anything that requires line art and not just text.
Of course, if no document will ever require anything more than simple
text, there's no need for PDF.

---

From: John Levine <[email-masked]>
Date: 1 Feb 2006 03:30:49 -0000

>edit the document?  PDF documents are not editable.

Well, this particular proposal only makes PDF an output format, but
the question is still a good one.  Without an editorial process to
create the PDFs, it's not much of an experiment.

I think I understand many of the issues here, and they don't strike me
as being amenable to solution by wiggling the back end.  If the goal
is to allow prettier output while still maintaining the stability and
reusability of plain text, that practically demands an input format
that is plain text underneath (for the stability and reusability) but
structured enough that it can be converted mechanicically to PDF or
whatever.  The obvious candidate is an XML profile with some tools to
render it into output formats.  But now we have to face questions
about which version is authoritative (the XML, presumably) and whether
the PDF version is any more than a convenience for people who don't
like to read XML.  I could easily envision a system that archives the
XML along with renderings into PDF, HTML, or whatever else people like
to read, adding new translators as desired to offer them in whatever
trendy new format (podcast?) is popular next.

None of this is is a technical stretch.  What's hard is making sure
the processes work, for the people who write drafts and RFCs, the
people who do the editorial work, and the people who use the results.
So I have to ask, what part of this problem does an experiment that
just permits PDF output solve?

R's,
John