--Resending as the first mail seems to have been eaten by a grinch-- Dear all, this is the first in a series of emails which I hope will advance into PDPs and then updated policies. Some of them are closely related, but I submit them individually so that if there are any hold-ups with a specific one, the other ones can still progress. My first suggestion is: 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. The reasoning behind this should be obvious: Ensure that all documents will be in the most simple-to-parse format now and forever. Richard [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/A