Re: discouraged by .docx was Re: Plagued by PPTX again

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--On Saturday, November 26, 2011 19:23 +0000 John Levine
<johnl@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

>> FWIW, I think that, if we are going to start banning
>> proprietary formats, it makes lots more sense to ban _all_
>> proprietary formats, not just picking and choosing among
>> proprietary formats that are, e.g., more recent or less
>> frequently reverse-engineered than others. So, yes, let's ban
>> pptx, docx, ppt, doc, non-standardized forms of PDF, GIF, ...
> 
> I gather that you consider ECMA-376 and ISO/IEC 29500 formats
> to be proprietary.  On the other hand, the definition of GIF
> is in a 20 year old document published by a predecessor of
> AOL, which includes a widely ignored trademark license
> requirement and an infamous patent. Hmmn.

Indeed.  If you reread what I wrote, I was not suggesting
permitting GIF (for the reasons you identify-- the thing is
proprietary no matter how often reverse-engineered and abused.
As far as ECMA-378 and ISO/IEC 29500 are concerned, the process
by which those standards were created was itself, in your words,
infamous.   But, if taken seriously, they permit "docx" and
_not_ ".doc".  That is precisely where my "be careful what you
wish for" comment originated.

> PS: I'm not denying that docx and pptx can be unpleasant to
> deal with, although LibreOffice hides a lot of the
> unpleasantness.

And anyone who uses those formats a lot from Office and is
either unlucky or knows what to look for, could, the last I
checked, rather easily create documents with which LibreOffice
will not cope effectively.

  john

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