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

Dear all,

the updated, and very belated, version looks like:


  The canonical and binding format of all policy documents is plain
text in ISO-8859-1 encoding. Author names and references may be
encoded in UTF-8.

  If a policy document can not reasonably be stored as plain text,
ALTERNATIVE will be used.

  If any policy document exists in both plain text and ALTERNATIVE,
plain text is binding.

  Any other form is considered non-binding as soon as a plain text or
ALTERNATIVE variant exist.

  All legacy policy documents which are still valid or relevant to
current policies will be transformed within a year of this proposal
becoming policy.

  All non-policy documents will be published in plain text or PDF/A-1a
with no requirement to try to produce ASCII art or similar.


ALTERNATIVE may equal PDF/A-1a or "text file with references to BMPs".
Personally, I think I prefer plain text as that's easier to deal with
on CLI, but as non-policy documents are in PDF (and if this gets
accepted PDF/A-1a) already, it may make more sense to keep both in the
same format.

Feedback either way would be appreciated.



Richard