--On Saturday, November 26, 2011 19:23 +0000 John Levine
<johnl(_at_)iecc(_dot_)com> wrote:
FWIW, I think that, if we are going to start banning
proprietary formats, it makes lots more sense to ban _all_
proprietary formats, not just picking and choosing among
proprietary formats that are, e.g., more recent or less
frequently reverse-engineered than others. So, yes, let's ban
pptx, docx, ppt, doc, non-standardized forms of PDF, GIF, ...
I gather that you consider ECMA-376 and ISO/IEC 29500 formats
to be proprietary. On the other hand, the definition of GIF
is in a 20 year old document published by a predecessor of
AOL, which includes a widely ignored trademark license
requirement and an infamous patent. Hmmn.
Indeed. If you reread what I wrote, I was not suggesting
permitting GIF (for the reasons you identify-- the thing is
proprietary no matter how often reverse-engineered and abused.
As far as ECMA-378 and ISO/IEC 29500 are concerned, the process
by which those standards were created was itself, in your words,
infamous. But, if taken seriously, they permit "docx" and
_not_ ".doc". That is precisely where my "be careful what you
wish for" comment originated.
PS: I'm not denying that docx and pptx can be unpleasant to
deal with, although LibreOffice hides a lot of the
unpleasantness.
And anyone who uses those formats a lot from Office and is
either unlucky or knows what to look for, could, the last I
checked, rather easily create documents with which LibreOffice
will not cope effectively.
john
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