Fwd: IVOA Standard Documents

[Marco C. Leoni]

Hi Jonathan,
    I'm forwarding your mail to the stdproc list ..... as you said, 
discussion about the the standards document recommendation should be 
addressed there.


Cheers,
    Marco



Jonathan McDowell wrote:

>Marco wrote:
>
>  
>
>>Well, html is the standard format for IVOA documents
>>    
>>
>
>[This is now beyond the scope of the voql list, but anyway...]
>Marco, although I support the decision to make HTML the canonical
>format for IVOA, I didn't realize we were going to be so restrictive,
>and I think we may need eventually to revise this rule.
> I think there are two roles for documents -
>   a source version which someone might use as a starting point for changes
>   a representation which is easy to read for everyone
>and I think both should be found on the official IVOA documents page,
>in multiple formats. HTML is in theory good for both because everyone
>can access it, although in practice it does not always come out the
>same in different browsers. PDF is also pretty good because I think
>it's easy to read and print for most people, but it's not a source version.
>Still it should be allowed as it's much easier to print a big PDF than
>a big HTML. And the operating system specific formats - latex and postscript
>for Unix, .doc for Microsoft - are good for source but each is inconvenient
>for some users - still I think they should both be findable on the
>official page, not just the twiki, if they are provided, AS LONG AS they
>are accompanied by a universally printable format version (HTML or, I would
>argue, PDF). 
> I worry that the current system may become so inflexible and
>inconvenient that people will end up just bypassing it. It would be much
>better if the IVOA Documents tree were the default place people went
>to find the official document they wanted, the WG twikis are not optimal
>for this.
> - Jonathan McDowell
>
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