Minutes are kept because one day somebody will need to show what was decided, and on that day the file has to open and look the way it did when it was signed. A font missing from the computer of the day, a colour nobody can say the meaning of, and the minutes say something else.
These minutes are written to the second part of the archival standard at level B, the plain one. It promises that the page keeps its looks: every font is carried inside the file, every colour says what it means, and nothing waits on a program or a network. It promises nothing about searching the words — that is level U — nor about the page saying what it is made of, which is level A.
Nothing is left out and nothing is simplified: this is the program exactly as it runs, for the developer who uses this library. The third is the description itself: a plain list of what the page has to say, which is what the service is sent.
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Three rulers — centimetres, inches and points — on a page that tells whatever prints it to put it out at exactly the size it was drawn, and to offer nothing else. Lay a tape measure on the printed sheet and you can check for yourself.
Two sittings bound into one file. Each page carries a record of its own — what it is, whose hand wrote it, the day it was written — the photograph on the second page carries one too, and each transcription is tied to the page it transcribes rather than to the file at large.
A records office's reference, the department it came from, the date until which the document must be kept and its classification, carried inside a file an archive still accepts. No archiving rule knows what a keep-until date is, so each entry carries a description of itself, and that description is what makes a checker accept a fact you alone invented. A second page adds a loan record whose entries are a yes or no, a type of file, a person's name, a measurement and two web addresses, and gives that page a hidden record of its own.
Every line of the note carries the order it was picked for, the article code and the shelf it came off, and prints none of them. The place where the driver signs carries the round and the van, and one beside the fold tick carries nothing but its own place.
Two pages carrying a copy of themselves that nobody sees: this is a heading, this is a table, and this is the order to read them in. Software reading the document aloud follows that instead of the order the marks were drawn in, and skips the running head. On the page, nothing looks any different.
A parts list whose first column is a picture rather than a word. Each picture carries the sentence somebody hears in its place, so nothing in the list is lost on a reader who cannot see it. On the page, the pictures are simply pictures.