41–50 of 71 posts
Or just write plaintext documents IETF style.
IETF RFCs haven’t been plain text for quite some years. RFC 2629 (June 1999) defined the first XML vocabulary, and RFC 7990 (December 2016) completed the process of declaring an XML format the canonical source, rather than plain text. To learn more, start at https://www.rfc-editor.org/rse/format-faq/ .
> ISO 32000-2 was also, however, the first and only core PDF specification published exclusively — and only for purchase — by ISO, inhibiting its use and adoption over the last five years. Who would have thought that "international standards" that require payment don't work well? How many people are willing to spend a couple hundred CHFs to access the PDF specs? Also it seems insane to me that the PDF creator, Adobe,…
> Who would have thought that "international standards" that require payment don't work well? Who says that they don't work well? All of the manufactured goods that you own, and how they got transported (e.g., shipping containers, boats, fuel for boats, etc) are probably based a dozens of ISO (and ANSI, SAE, etc ) standards that had to be paid for. It's been the norm for about a century and helped build the modern wo…
A more reasonable model these days would probably be a per-seat license for an entire segment of the ISO library. As it is, I don’t even know if a given standard would actually be useful to have for my work, companies need to decide which employee(s) to license a copy for etc…
* I’m surprised it’s not billed in special drawing rights.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think what a lot of people don't understand is that a lawyers job is to provide advise, not to make decisions.
Specifically, lawyers advise their clients on how to avoid liability. The minimum liability comes from doing nothing, so the default advice is "Don't."
You must be working in a very unregulated industry if that’s true!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
IETF RFCs haven’t been plain text for quite some years. RFC 2629 (June 1999) defined the first XML vocabulary, and RFC 7990 (December 2016) completed the process of declaring an XML format the canonical source, rather than plain text. To learn more, start at https://www.rfc-editor.org/rse/format-faq/ .
That's just for ease of translation into other formats, right? No human is reading/implementing the XML.
I know it’s common to author in something else and then convert into the canonical XML form, but I’d be surprised if it wasn’t also common to author in the XML format. It’s not an onerous format.
> ISO 32000-2 was also, however, the first and only core PDF specification published exclusively — and only for purchase — by ISO, inhibiting its use and adoption over the last five years. Who would have thought that "international standards" that require payment don't work well? How many people are willing to spend a couple hundred CHFs to access the PDF specs? Also it seems insane to me that the PDF creator, Adobe,…
Yep, it's a giant scam... Same for (a lot of) science.. You pay taxes to build universities, you pay taxes for professors and other educators paychecks, you pay taxes for research grants, and all that money from you is than used to 'discover' something, but you need to pay some private company to actually read the article. It's slowly changing, but still, a lot of science, for "poor people", is only available on pira…
> ISO 32000-2 was also, however, the first and only core PDF specification published exclusively — and only for purchase — by ISO, inhibiting its use and adoption over the last five years. Who would have thought that "international standards" that require payment don't work well? How many people are willing to spend a couple hundred CHFs to access the PDF specs? Also it seems insane to me that the PDF creator, Adobe,…
This works for ISO standards in many areas. In many environments there are requirements to be standards-compliant. Buying the standard is a prove of compliance. (Turn it around: "you didn't even obtain the standard! How could your product be compliant?") This is of course mostly relevant for engineering. Less so in IT, but even IT standards compliance is sometimes part of government contracts. At least for language c…
ISO 18013-5 and co.
> ISO 32000-2 was also, however, the first and only core PDF specification published exclusively — and only for purchase — by ISO, inhibiting its use and adoption over the last five years. Who would have thought that "international standards" that require payment don't work well? How many people are willing to spend a couple hundred CHFs to access the PDF specs? Also it seems insane to me that the PDF creator, Adobe,…
> Who would have thought that "international standards" that require payment don't work well? Who says that they don't work well? All of the manufactured goods that you own, and how they got transported (e.g., shipping containers, boats, fuel for boats, etc) are probably based a dozens of ISO (and ANSI, SAE, etc ) standards that had to be paid for. It's been the norm for about a century and helped build the modern wo…
So many small companies or even teams at big companies don’t know about the standards that they should follow (ISO, ASME, UL etc) or if they do they don’t want to pay for them. Then there’s the complexity of tracking licenses and copies with electronic downloads, which I promise you no one does 100% right. There are third parties who will track this for companies but I’ve never managed to get anyone to use them.
It’s hard to even get everyone I’ve worked with to follow ASME Y14.5, which is the drawing and dimensioning standard for mechanical engineering (in the US).
Part of the challenge is that so many of these standards are broken up into 50 different parts that are purchased separately. Oh, you want to know how to dimension castings, that’s a separate document. Abbreviations to use on drawings, that’s separate. Drawing formats, that’s separate. Etc.
The result is that people collect old PDFs they “found” somewhere, and no one has a complete, up to date set of standards for any field. Even if someone at a company tries to get people to pay for standards, they maybe put them on a shared drive somewhere and they aren’t properly licensed for the team.
The results are that standards aren’t known or properly followed. Which is supposedly the purpose of standards orgs, but most of them use publications as a source of income, which defeats their purpose.
There are a few standards like USB, which are free to download. This should be universal.
So I'm supposed to have a PDF reader to implement a PDF reader? What's the bootstrapping strategy here? tsk.
You open it in Adobe™ Acrobat™ Reader, of course. The first version of the PDF Reference Manual was published to accompany the first version of Acrobat™ [0].
[0] https://opensource.adobe.com/dc-acrobat-sdk-docs/pdfstandard...
Half-joking—-Does the standard explain why some documents I open in Acrobat Reader ask me if I want to save, when I only opened the file (and made no intentional edits)??
Also many PDF viewers have little to no support to javascript in PDF.