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--