--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 _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf