Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!ginosko!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!uwm.edu!bionet!agate!ucbvax!UDEL.EDU!Mills
From: Mills@UDEL.EDU
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re:  Comment on RFC1124 (?)
Message-ID: <8909302326.aa13204@huey.udel.edu>
Date: 1 Oct 89 03:26:13 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 31

John (and others),

I have a serious dillema. My students and I work with several text, image
and statistics systems, all of which produce PostScript. My advice has been
to use the best technology currently available to maximize research
productivity and exposure in the many scientific and engineering archives
available to us, including RFCs. Unless a document is in fact pure text, this
usually means PostScript. This is how we submit articles for publication
in conference proceedings, archive journals and even our dear own Computer
Communication Review. For the reasons mentioned in my recent message, we are
not prepared to render every document in ASCII, regardless of content, and
are not prepared to maintain documents in more than one form. Thus, the real
question is whether PostScript submissions will be allowed in the RFC
archives or whether they will be published elsewhere and not appear in the
RFC archives at all.


I am a stout supporter of the RFC process and would hope that our community
can be viewed as a leader in technology of electric publishing, archiving
and distribution. Just as CCR is viewed as a pioneer in print publishing
by encouraging article submission in electric form (currently PostScript),
I would hope our community can show that it is possible to save the production
cost and even a few trees by remote access of the archives, while preserving
the full capabilities of print media.

There are lots of things that PostScript does not provide and that may
become available in future, including ODA. When the standards have stabilized,
when software is available and when such capability has spread even to the
sites that have no PostScript printers now, I promise to become a zealot.

Dave