On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 10:32:49AM -0500, Donald Eastlake wrote: > version/font/... problems are overblow, etc. As a data point, I would > refer people to > http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/031010-hackers-love-to-exploit-pdf.html
That appears to be an argument that Adobe's products contain bugs, and not an argument that PDF/A (to pick the only reasonable PDF format one would use for RFCs) is subject to such attacks. Your argument above is roughly akin to arguing that the web is a bad publication format because some browser-of-choice is loaded with exploitable flaws. PDF/A is a deliberately-limited format designed specifically for archival purposes. As a consequence, it has robust support from the library world. These are the same people who use the egregiously-flawed MARC format because that was the standard they settled on several years ago. The same people, for that matter, who have filing systems in various libraries dating to periods where "Holy Roman Emperor" was a seriously powerful position -- because that's how it's organized, and they're not going to change it for the sake of innovation. The IETF format is specifically designed for, as far as I can tell, a particular printer, long since out of production. It has robust support from, well, the IETF tools team. We don't even have a currently-maintained, up to date version of the software that was supposed to be the new-look equivalent to *roff for generating Internet Drafts correctly formatted. I do get the arguments in favour of ASCII, though I think there are some pretty serious countervailing arguments (like, for instance, that we can't spell many contributors' names, to take an easy one). But the RFC format _is not_ plain ASCII. Just ask anyone whose draft has failed the increasingly stringent and lengthy list of IDNits tests due to bad pagination in their I-D. Best, A -- Andrew Sullivan a...@shinkuro.com Shinkuro, Inc. _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
