Yaakov Stein wrote:
It does not matter how many people can read MSWord.
The only supported formats should be the ones where you know
what the format is (and not the ones that depend on particular
program).
Why ?
Formats are there to stay. Programs change. Microsoft has modified the
Word format multiple times, sometimes breaking compatibility completely,
sometimes just introducing minor compatibility problems affecting
specific documents.
(Anecdote: back when I was working for Motorola in the late 90s,
Windows-based colleagues came over to us with Macs so that we would
import their old documents and "save as" something their current Windows
version would read)
There is not a single "Word" format. There are partly-compatible
"binary" versions, there is the XML format introduced in Office 11
(2003), and there's yet another incompatible XML format that will be
introduced in Office 12.
So exactly which one are you referring to?
If you take that as an axiom, then indeed it is easy to rule
lots of formats out.
But, what is the justification of the axiom?
Why not say - only use formats for which there are decent
editors easily available?
And why do all the other SDOs get along with non-ASCII formats?
On my intranet I have a list of 120+ SDOs in the communications
and computer-science fields, and although I haven't gone through
them all (I have asked someone to do so) I haven't found another
group that uses ASCII files.
If the axiom is so strong, then why doesn't it bother anyone else?
You're confusing the issue of whether ASCII is good enough with the one
whether Word is an acceptable replacement for it, it seems.
If you're concerned with the limitations of ASCII, I'd advise pushing
for something that doesn't have these limitations, yet is open, stable
and really widely available. Such as HTML 4 (strict).
Best regards, Julian
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