Path: utzoo!yunexus!davecb
From: davecb@yunexus.UUCP (David Collier-Brown)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re: Comment on RFC1124 (?)
Message-ID: <4014@yunexus.UUCP>
Date: 29 Sep 89 12:34:05 GMT
Article-I.D.: yunexus.4014
References: <5446@asylum.SF.CA.US>  <5685@asylum.SF.CA.US>
Organization: York U. Computing Services
Lines: 41

karl@asylum.SF.CA.US (Karl Auerbach) writes:
| There are really two distinct issues on the postscript RFC issue.
| One is the mere readibility of the document [...]
| The second, and to me much more important issue, is that postscript
| hides the content in lots of directives.  [...]

  Given these two requirements, the implication is that one employ a 
notation that expresses the "directives" in as succinct and identifiable
a way as possible. One can then:
	1) read the document in editable form, ignoring the 
	   occasional directive,
	2) process the document into final form, evaluating 
	   the directives, or
	3) process the document into an approximation of the
	   final form, with placeholders used for things which
	   cannto be represented (eg, empty boxes for diagrams)

| 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.]

  I'm not religious about which multi-media standard you wish to use,
subject to the requirements above.  SGML subsets, ASN.1 subsets or just
postscript run through a postprocessor to make it readable in its editable
form all meet the requirements.  Which to use is a managment decision, 
based on which standards body we respect (:-)).


--dave
ps: For mere ease of implementation, a requirement that fill-but-no-justify
    be used when creating postscript plus a few sed scripts would probably
    render an editable form that we could live with...
-- 
David Collier-Brown,  | davecb@yunexus, ...!yunexus!davecb or
72 Abitibi Ave.,      | {toronto area...}lethe!dave 
Willowdale, Ontario,  | Joyce C-B:
CANADA. 416-223-8968  |    He's so smart he's dumb.