On Mon, 2 Jan 2006, 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).
Why ?
If you take that as an axiom, then indeed it is easy to rule
lots of formats out.
But, what is the justification of the axiom?
Why not say - only use formats for which there are decent
editors easily available?
"Decent editor" is in the eye of the beholder ... We're all different
people and what is good for one maybe bad for somebody else. What
matters is availability of choices and if type of format is not known,
then it is not an open system and you're locked in one vendor (even if
others claim to support it,without details of the format, that can not
be completely true). Where as when format is known, the software to
read/write it can be created by anyone for any architecture.
So, like many people told you already on this list, MSWord is not a
format that IETF should support. If IETF is interested in supporting
direct "editor" format in the future, then it should probably be
OpenDoc - once its more widely used and more then two implementations
for all major platforms.
Also with vendor-developed format, the actual format tends to change
from one version of the program to the other - that has been the problem
with PDF as well, eventhough unlike MSWord it is an open format. So one
particular version that is well supported could in this case be chosen.
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.
The question you should ask is can you find a platform where ASCII
file CAN NOT be read and created? Now substitute some other format
in place of ASCII and ask the same question....
If the axiom is so strong, then why doesn't it bother anyone else?
Lets go ahead and ask then -
Does anyone else think that IETF should allow documents which
format/structure is not publicly known as one of the ways to
distribute IETF specifications?
I think answers so far have been quite clear and from multiple people,
but if somebody else wants to support above, then lets hear it.
--
William Leibzon
Elan Networks
william@xxxxxxxx
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