Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!apple!hercules!fernwood!asylum!karl From: karl@asylum.SF.CA.US (Karl Auerbach) Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip Subject: Re: Comment on RFC1124 (?) Message-ID: <5685@asylum.SF.CA.US> Date: 28 Sep 89 19:01:57 GMT References: <5446@asylum.SF.CA.US>Reply-To: karl@asylum.UUCP (Karl Auerbach) Organization: The Asylum; Belmont, CA Lines: 29 There are really two distinct issues on the postscript RFC issue. One is the mere readibility of the document -- I would guess that many (but I am sure not all) have access to postscript printers of one sort or another. (Although it must be noticed that some things which fit legally into the postscript form are really bit-mapped files from tools like Tex, etc, and tend to be printable only on printers with lots of memory.) The second, and to me much more important issue, is that postscript hides the content in lots of directives. One simply can't apply any sort of text based tools to digest, correlate, index, or even grep the contents. I do believe that we need a means to have better documents, including good images. And I can see mixed documents which have text mixed with postscript pictures. I can even see postscript wrapped text, BUT it must be without the mass of directives which are injected by typical word processors. My suggestion is, hang onto your hats, to use the ASN.1 body part definition from X.400. Using that you can cleanly separate text from postscript from digitized voice from fax from ... And the ASN.1 isn't painful when used in this limited sense (and with some sensible limitations on the use of constructors, etc). [The reason I like ASN.1 is that it was designed for precisely this purpose -- mixed media representation.] --karl--