Subject: RE: Image attachments to ASCII RFCs (was: Re: Last Call: 'ProposedExperiment: Normative Format in Addition to ASCII Text' toExperimental RFC (draft-ash-alt-formats))

From: "Hallam-Baker, Phillip" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 16 Jun 2006 15:43:01 -0700

> From: Noel Chiappa [mailto:[email-masked]] 

>     > From: "Hallam-Baker, Phillip" <[email-masked]>
> 
>     > Why go to all that trouble to create infrastructure to 
> support an
>     > obsolete document format when we can get all the infrastructure
>     > required to support a modern, open format
> 
> Because those of us who've been around for a while have been 
> repeatedly screwed when something that was, at one time, the 
> latest and greatest "modern, open format" turns out, N years 
> later, to no longer be supported.

Do you fear that the world's desire to hear the pearls of wisdom of the IETF will be any less than for Tim's team?

This problem is precisely the reason why standards exist for HTML. 

Congress has its archives kept in SGML, the Oxford English Dictionary is in HTML.

Unless there is a major catastrophe that wipes out enough human life that the Internet ceases to be viable in any case there is absolutely no possibility that the ability to read legacy HTML formats will be lost.

Congress and other world governments have committed billions worth of documents to digital archives.

It could be that the IETF has got this right and everyone else including the professionals in the document archiving business have got it right.

But the probability is overwhelmingly that the reverse is the case.

And if the professionals have perchance got it wrong more billions will be available to fix their mess.

All it takes to ensure that the IETF XHTML corpus is compliant with the latest version is to run a perl script once a decade.

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