🚀 go-pugleaf

Sigh.  Why is the truth so hard to swallow when it is inconvenient?

No, Barry, I 'm not talking from "common sense". I spent 4.5 years as a member
of ANSI X3H3, and I've gone rounds with ANSI both within and outside the
committee about cheaper access to documents. You seriously underestimate the
sales of any one standards document, and ignore the hundreds of different
documents available from each standards body. The paper documents are indeed a
good source of income, and protecting that income is the express purpose of
forbidding machine readable document formats.  We were explicitly forbidden
to disseminate or make available the working copies of our documents, and were
put to great lengths to develop an access scheme that would allow committee
members of a large committee to make changes while preventing others from
dialing up and downloading them.  This slowed down _our_ work.

I thoroughly agree with you that this impedes access to and use of the
standards, but it is still reality, and necessary lacking other sufficient
funding for the standards bodies' central administrative offices.

As for your suggestion of a "checksum" to protect document integrety, this
would prevent such little repairs as correcting spelling, and so would be
immediately ignored or replaced as the document is updated.

Kent, the man from xanth.
<xanthian@Zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> <xanthian@well.sf.ca.us>