On 03/15/2013 08:12 PM, Richard Hartmann wrote:
The canonical and binding format of all documents is plain text in UTF-8 encoding. If a document can not reasonably be stored as plain text, PDF/A-1a[1] will be used. If any document exists in both plain text and PDF/A-1a, plain text is binding. Any other form is considered non-binding as soon as a plain text or PDF/A-1a variant exist. All legacy documents which are still valid or relevant to current policies will be transformed within a year of this proposal becoming policy.
I would be very happy if this suggestion would turn into a policy, I can agree with the way it is formulated above. That doesn't mean I can't have some remarks which could still be up for discussion. * I feel it would be even better to have a plain text version be mandatory and authoritative for each and every document. We could allow for a PDF/A appendix to documents (or even a full PDF/A version of said document) which really can't do without. * The RFC style guide [1] could be a good base. Replace ASCII with UTF-8, remove the paging requirement and perhaps some other bits and pieces we don't need and I think we could be there. Having very similar guidelines as other major organizations does seem like a big plus to me. As a relative newcomer to all-things-RIPE, I would have expected there to be a policy about document formats already. Either I can't find it or I'm rightfully surprised there currently isn't one at all. Gerry [1] http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc-style-guide/rfc-style