[ncc-services-wg] Pre-PDP discussion: "All RIPE documents should be plain text"

Dear all,

this is the first in a series of emails which I hope will advance into
PDPs and then updated policies. Some of them are closely related, but
I submit them individually so that if there are any hold-ups with a
specific one, the other ones can still progress.

My first suggestion is:


  The canonical and binding format of all documents is plain text in
UTF-8 encoding.
  If a document can not reasonably be stored as plain text,
PDF/A-1a[1] will be used.
  If any document exists in both plain text and PDF/A-1a, plain text is binding.
  Any other form is considered non-binding as soon as a plain text or
PDF/A-1a variant exist.
  All legacy documents which are still valid or relevant to current
policies will be transformed within a year of this proposal becoming
policy.


The reasoning behind this should be obvious: Ensure that all documents
will be in the most simple-to-parse format now and forever.


Richard

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/A