Format of uploaded documents

[jang@jang.nl]

As a newbie to various DITA TCs and SCs, I see a couple of strange things that might be easy to improve on. I am sending this to the DITA TC group for consideration as a general proposal on one detail of the DITA standards work.

Documents that are uploaded to the OASIS server have a wild variety of file formats, which does not make life of volunteers on the various committees easier. TXT, DOC, RTF, PPT etc. should not be considered appropriate output format for documents that are only used to read stuff. If I want to read any of those documents, I have to open a program that I might or might not have available on my computer. After all, I just want to read the stuff, not make changes to it.

Documents that are meant for reading (such as minutes and proposals) should in my view ALWAYS be uploaded as PDF - being the simplest and most supported file format in our digital world. And every program has an option to print output to PDF.

Is this making sense to more people than just me, myself and I ?

Jang - the philosopher of the group