Fw: printable online docs

["Spuzzum" <spuzzum at spuzzum dot byond dot com>]

Oops, didn't CC it here.  Now it will be. ;-)

----- Original Message -----
From: "Spuzzum" <spuzzum@spuzzum.byond.com>
To: "James R. Dunson" <jdunson@vt.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, April 03, 2002 3:21 PM
Subject: Re: printable online docs


> >    General agreement.  However, be aware that there is support in the
U.S.
> > for making various sorts of reverse-engineering even more illegal than
it
> > has been made recently.  Some industry types seem to be in favor of
> > legislation, or an interpretation thereof, where reverse-engineering
*file
> > formats* would be illegal.  I, and most technology types not working for
a
> > megacorp, hope this does not come to pass.  However, it seems prudent to
> > avoid file formats set by any particular company (as opposed to, say,
> > international standards committees) unless they have been specifically
put
> > under an open source friendly license.
> >
> >    In the meantime, IMO the most useful formats to have the docs in is
> some
> > sort of "source" format that is the official version, and to have
readily
> > available converters for plain ASCII, HTML and PDF that preserve as much
> of
> > the structure as practical in their respective formats.  A direct
> > Postscript version might occasionally be handy for printing, but I
suspect
> > that anyone who needs that can use Ghostscript off of the PDF format, so
> it
> > would be a much lower priority.  The source format should probably be
> based
> > on ASCII with tags, so that it is amenable to various sorts of diff,
grep,
> > and patch commands.
>
> I'm fairly sure Microsoft has released the file format as open-licensed.
> Just to be on the safe side, though, I think I'll go do some searching
some
> time. ;-)
>
> _______________
>
> .-=[ Spuzzum ]=-.
> (who wonders why, suddenly, his signature isn't being added automatically
> any more...)
>