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).
They are written to be readable by everybody.
Sun-cenrtic, IBM-centric and real computercompanies tend to receject mails
and documents that need a special Operating System together with a special
wordprocesser in a special version to be able to process, read or write a
document. I remember there used to be several versions of Microsoft Word
beeing incompatible over Mac, Dos, Windows and OS/2 . That was the time
when companies decided a document has to be 7-bit ASCII without country
specifics extensions. Alternatively EBCDIC was welcome to. There still
exist programmes like kermit that can be used to transfer documents
between flatfile ASCII and structured file EBCDIC over hardware borders.
Even html is designed 7-bit ASCII and breaks when you use 8-bits and
change hardware.
With 7-Bit ASCII it does not matter wether you use an X-BOX with 8-bit
words or a mainframe with 36-bit words. Using 16 bit words breaks when
you move from the X-BOX to the X-BOX/360 both from the same company
but building on different processors.
Why ?
If you take that as an axiom, then indeed it is easy to rule
lots of formats out.
Otherwise you rule a lot of participants out. There was never a
good reason for IBM to move from SNA to tcp/ip. On SNA they had
document exchange. There was never a good reason for DEC to move
from DDCMP to tcp/ip. DDCMP was much more flexible. Why should
Microsoft move from NetBIOS to tcp/ip. They never got it working
without quirks. So you rest with a handful of unix-centric
companies, mostly sun and next. They do speak ASCII what now?
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.
I usually dont bother. If I cannot read it I delete it. Probably
you never got an answer for documents I could not read.
If the axiom is so strong, then why doesn't it bother anyone else?
Y(J)S
You see, they delete it :)
Maybe their virus scanner did in the first place :)
Cheers
Peter and Karin
--
Peter and Karin Dambier
The Public-Root Consortium
Graeffstrasse 14
D-64646 Heppenheim
+49(6252)671-788 (Telekom)
+49(179)108-3978 (O2 Genion)
+49(6252)750-308 (VoIP: sipgate.de)
mail: peter@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
mail: peter@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://iason.site.voila.fr/
https://sourceforge.net/projects/iason/
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