On 2020-11-07, at 10:14, Eric Vyncke (evyncke) <evyncke=40cisco.com@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > 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. The MOOX (Microsoft open office XML) formats are documented to some extent in an ECMA standard that was fast-tracked as an ISO standard, and the .docx part of the MOOX specification is even almost usable in practice. So, yes, this is around. So is, e.g., docbook, which is actually does have the structure for what is needed for publishing specification. > 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. I’m not sure why I would want to incur the mind-boggling complexity and legacy baggage of MOOX if I don’t also want to use their very widely used tool. > And of course, we can also wonder why we, as a community, have no problem to use github.com ;-) But we do. It is only acceptable because the core of it is open-source git, and we have convinced ourselves that there is a safety net in regularly backing up all the chrome that github adds to it. > [*] 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 Interesting. I haven’t looked into this in detail, but at first look it seems to confirm my reservations about the complexity of .docx, which will make it harder to sustain community-based projects that are based on it. Where I need to interface to .docx (those pesky contracts etc.), I use pandoc for converting that to/from markdown. That narrow waist would also give one an easy interface to RFCXML (well, OK, I finally need to make that RFCXML to markdown converter ready for prime time). Grüße, Carsten
