Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uwm.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!munnari.oz.au!mullian!gja
From: gja@mullian.ee.mu.oz.au (Inspector Gadget)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re: Comment on RFC1124 (?) / OSI Transition
Message-ID: <2380@munnari.oz.au>
Date: 10 Oct 89 23:13:45 GMT
References: <8910100305.AA19076@sayshell.umd.edu>
Sender: news@cs.mu.oz.au
Reply-To: gja@mullian.ee.mu.OZ.AU (Inspector Gadget)
Organization: Dept. of Electrical Engineering, University of Melbourne
Lines: 35

In article <8910100305.AA19076@sayshell.umd.edu> louie@SAYSHELL.UMD.EDU ("Louis A. Mamakos") writes:
>Geez.  What a fuss.
>
	[.......]
>This is my perspective as a serious user of RFC 1119.  Before you
>condemn the form, print the document and ask yourself if it would be
>as easy to understand if it was a "dumb" ASCII text document?
>
>louie

	IMO you've missed the point entirely. If _all_ that was ever 
available was paper versions from NIC (or where-ever) and people
were asked "Pretty Laser-printed or Plain 'ASCII' version?" I'm sure
everyone would take the pretty laser-printed ones for their bookshelves.
The problem is that the _form_ of the document is (for most people)
on electronic storage/retrieval systems. Postscript forms are of no use
at all until they're _printed_, yet not everyone wants to use paper
versions of the documents (as has been re-iterated over and over).
[ 'what ever happened to the paper-less office?', I thinks to meself]

	In case you think I don't understand how nice PS versions would be
I should mention that I've just "wasted" a week or so transferring a 
collection of RFCS to a MAC and prettying them up for laser-printing.
What I would have given for PS versions if they'd been archived somewhere.
(no flames about me stupidly ignoring "archive something-or-other" please.
what's done is done). However regardless of the inconvenience to me when
producing paper versions I'd still see it as important that ASCII versions
as stored for online reference (until everyone has graphics screens and 
a collection of programs to search PS documents just like we can now search
plain text documents. 'PSgrep' and 'PSmore' spring to mind.....).

	The issue is not simply ease of understanding, it's ease of
information retrieval.

Grenville Armitage