Re: postscript vs PDF, Call for Community Feedback: Retiring IETF FTP Service

[John Levine <[e-mail]>]

In article <541CBB9D85D6EEF8F3D05D51@PSB> you write:
>> I looked at a few of the first PS RFCs from 1989 in the viewer
>> on my Mac and they all look fine.
>
>Good to know and not surprising... but "looks fine" is not
>necessarily sufficient to satisfy Tim's criterion of "intent of
>the author".  My personal guess is that particular criterion
>--at least as I, and I think Rich, interpreted it is basically
>impossible. 

Well, sure, without a time machine there's no way to tell what someone
saw on his screen or page 30 years ago, but I would be pretty amazed
if what people saw now was any different from what they saw then,
other than the font substitutions I mentioned. Adobe is still around,
they made the most widely used Postscript rendering software then and
still do now, and they take stability of the spec very seriously.

Even ASCII has its bitrot aspects. As I'm sure you recall, the
character ^ that now looks like a circumflex sometimes used to be an
uparrow, and _ which now looks like an underline was often a left
arrow.  But we seem to be OK with old ASCII documents anyway.

R's,
John