On 2020-11-07, at 03:36, John Levine <johnl@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:In the other 99% of the world everyone exchanges MS Word documents. I'm certainly not saying that's wonderful, but it's reality.Hammer/nail. 99 % of the world is not collaboratively developing high-quality technical specifications, so I don’t care that much about those 99 % as a role model.
A lot of the rest of the world is working collaboratively,
including using commercial products like Microsoft's Office 365 to
develop reports and other documents. Or rival products from other
companies. Whether they are on par with our "high quality
specifications" is debatable, but I have no doubt that at least
some are. I am definitely not proposing that we immediately switch
to using commercial products, but you cannot just dismiss the
experience of all these users.
Sure. Sending iterative versions of large documents by e-mail is not exactly recommended practice. State of the art communication uses cloud services from that. Kind of the whole reason why Microsoft developed servers like SharePoint, or services like Office365. And of course Microsoft is not alone there, Google has services like that too, and quite a few other companies. Again, I am not advocating moving to such services. Just mentioning that they do in fact existI expect the minutes from the apartment owners’ meeting to be in MS-Word. Or a random document from our university administration (which is slowly learning not to send around MS-Word documents as a replacement for emails :-).
But technical documents in the computer science department? Ha. Gitlab, hackmd/codimd, and (in the math/theoretical computer science world) overleaf are our collaboration platforms. (My information security class uses markdown for all its assignments. Even though that is not identified as a learning objective of that class, it creates great satisfaction to talk to alumni a couple of years later and hear unsolicited testimonials how they have weaned themselves off the time-wasting use of other formats.)
It may very well be that ad hoc tools developed for our community
end up better for us than generic tools developed by commercial
companies. But you should not take that for granted. After all,
the commercial success of these companies depends on keeping
customers happy, and collaboration on documents, spreadsheets or
other items is their bread-and-butter.
-- Christian Huitema
