Not commenting on the core of the discussion but only agreeing with John about the 'proprietary' feature of MS-Word file format as I 'played' recently on a conversion tool [*] from IETF XMLv[23] to the Microsoft .DOCX. Actually and for many years, the format is open and public: http://officeopenxml.com/ it is indeed a lot of XML files that are zipped together with a docx extension. Personally, I won't be happy to select MS-Word as the TOOL but I won't disagree too much on using Office Open XML FORMAT. The nuance is important IMHO. And the same reasoning of course for other tools and formats. And of course, we can also wonder why we, as a community, have no problem to use github.com ;-) -éric [*] https://github.com/evyncke/xml2docx and/or the very basic conversion https://www.vyncke.org/xml2docx/, all being proof of concept and not real tools of course -----Original Message----- From: ietf <ietf-bounces@xxxxxxxx> on behalf of John Levine <johnl@xxxxxxxxx> Organization: Taughannock Networks Date: Saturday, 7 November 2020 at 03:37 To: "ietf@xxxxxxxx" <ietf@xxxxxxxx> Cc: "mcr+ietf@xxxxxxxxxxxx" <mcr+ietf@xxxxxxxxxxxx> Subject: Re: and... text for the win In article <32243.1604698457@localhost> you write: >And after 25 years of people telling us that text is dead, and we should move >on to their favorite vendor-proprietary tool, and get with the "hip" kids, >guess what: text-based markdown is all over github (gitlab, wiki*, ...) > >Text based formats continue to win: markdown, yaml, JSON, etc. >All the cool kids use text based things today. In our little bubble we do. In the other 99% of the world everyone exchanges MS Word documents. I'm certainly not saying that's wonderful, but it's reality. I'd say Word is semi-proprietary. There is a nominal spec for DOCX files (they're zip archives containing XML files), and what Word actually does is close ehough to the spec that Libreoffice, Apple Pages et al. can mostly keep up. R's, John
