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RMS: Putting an End to Word Attachments
sombragris writes "I've spotted in NewsForge a very interesting editorial by none other than RMS himself on the subject of getting rid of those annoying MS Word attachment that people send. The essay is worth thinking and doubtless worth implementing." I've found that KWord and Abiword both did a fine job of reading Word files - it's the being able to Save As Word where things get messy.
Most computer users use Microsoft Word. That is unfortunate for them, because Word is proprietary software, denying its users the freedom to study, change, copy, and redistribute it
Most Word users, I expect, want to write letters to their mothers, not recompile the application.
Hogsback
How can we get rid of Word attachments without incurring the wrath or Bernie Shifman? If he can't send out his resume, he'll probably sue...
When I heard that Word would support saving to HTML I was very happy. Then I saw the HTML that was output and was depressed again. Dreamweaver does have a neat feature - "clean up Word HTML" which makes them a little more acceptable, but it is a nightmare to edit in HTML anything that was generated in Word.
It's a shame, as XHTML and CSS allows for very clean separation of content from presentation... maybe someday they will hit critical mass and it will be the accepted form of "rich" content presentation. But for now I have to slog through RTF, Word, Powerpoint (ugh) and Excel documents that are not converted cleanly to the office suites on Linux.
Sig under construction since 1998.
Isn't PDF a secret format too, eventhough there are readers for linux?
You don't need email with Word attachments. The problem is having such a format be so widespead that it interferes with normal communication, like email. I am a UNIX network engineer that has been bitten *many* times by the 'please send a resume as a Word doc'. That is difficult if you don't run Windows at all.
Though I generally feel RMS isn't an effective speaker, he definitely has a point here. Honestly, do people really need Word for the majority of text documents? Is everyone sending emails with tabular, image-embedded documents? I think not.
Open-source is already marginalized.
... not just Open Source advocates.
Word documents, along with other proprietary formats, especially ones which may or may not be able to be opened with future software, are a bad idea for information transfer.
It's a stupid, terrible, dumb standard which Microsoft revels in because it helps to ensure their position and sales.
It behooves everyone who uses computers to compose documents and share information to break the current standard
This, I believe, is RMS's point. The fact that he has Open Source advocates' ears is a fact of reality, not the ideal.
As my father lik@(munch munch)...
I don't think that calling Word "a secret proprietary format" (true as it may be) will make much sense to the average Windows user.
A more general issue is that all of the examples provided are political in nature.
Could one accomplish something similar with a message like "I'm sorry but I'm unable to read documents in Microsoft Word format because I use Linux. Please send your document in a format that I can read, such as ASCII Text or PDF."
Educating people about the political issues surrounding proprietary document formats isn't always appropriate in a business situation. If I need to ask a customer to use a format other than Word, I also need to be able to do it in a non-alienating way. I think that Stallman offers some good suggestions, but the specific examples he provides wouldn't work well in some social contexts.
That is, it should be possible to read and edit the same document with different open-source tools [since there is no chance that we all use the same] without loosing neither text, nor formatting or meta information (like indexes, cross-references, review marks etc...).
Ciao
----
FB
.doc isn't a single format, though. If .doc were what it were as of WinWord 2.0, we'd have no problems by now. But every version the .doc format changes, and everyone runs around trying to reverse engineer it YET AGAIN. And if you finish that, they'll do it again. I have nothing against de facto standards, but a "standard" that can be changed at any arbitrary point, by a single company (and frequently is) isn't much of a standard at all.
Visit me on #weirdness on the Galaxynet.
There's a very simple way of changing MS-Word's default format to something other than .doc format. I use Word a fair bit, and my copy is set to automatically save everything in rich text format. I have yet to encounter ANY formatting that can't be saved in that format. (Maybe because I don't write Macro viruses).
.rtf documents seamlessly. (It just treats them like regular .doc files). Don't forget to explain that occaisionally the system will complain that "some formatting might be lost", but that's not really true. It's only the very strange formatting that no one ever uses that would be lost. This has been good enough for all the non-technical people I've explained this to.
Explain to people that if they do this, their documents can be read by MANY more people, and that it doesn't affect them at all because MS-Word can read
.
. --- If you're looking for free e-mail you won't find it here! http://www.noemailhere.com
No.
RMS' main problem with Word format is that it is non-standard, and most people probably don't care. But that isn't the only problem that format has. The other major problem it has is the same thing you'll find in most MS formats: it contains too much power. In order to support Word format in a Word-compatable way, you have to support the scripting language and virus capability too.
And that is a Bad Thing, even if you don't give a damn about open vs closed formats. Getting people off Word format is a good idea for everyone except for anti-virus software vendors.
So if RMS' goal seems unrealistic because it's too idealistic, by all means, just be pragmatic instead. And the pragmatic thing to do is say goodbye to MS Word's file format.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I've read the title too quick, and for a moment I thought Good Old Rick had decided to go all way and become a desert hermit, as in "RMS: Putting an End to World Attachments"
How can it be a standard when nobody knows what it is and it keeps changing? If it were a standard, then there would already be "good, free implementations." Instead, software developers, open source and otherwise, have to keep writing almost-good-enough filters to load and save the documents. While RMS' political arguments typically make my eyes glaze over, it's stupid to author a document without taking into consideration whether the recipient can read it.
While the premise of your argument may be unfortunately true, the suggestion simply won't work because Microsoft won't let it work. That's why they keep changing the format and don't publish the spec in the first place.
When they reply with a "huh?" then I share some of my views on proprietary and non-standard text formats and suggest RTF when sharing docs with others. With simpler users, I'll just simplify, explaining that "RTF is the form you use when emailing documents, DOC is mostly meant for local editing before you 'publish' by printing or saving in a public format."
Until they experience the annoyance of unavailable or cyrptic data first hand, most folks will write you off as a quack for complaining. They just can't imagine a world where e-mail attachments don't open nicely so long as you know how to double-click.
This is a meaningless point. The fact that a specific subset of users, however large, cannot get at the source has no bearing on its importance. Even though I personally can look at and understand [some] source, I would never be able to look at it all. The value is that I know that there are multiple people looking at and improving the source that I'm not looking at, and doing it from an end-user perspective, not a software-producer perspective. I may not be a kernel hacker, but someone else with my hardware is, and I benefit from the improvements he or she makes to the kernel. "I don't recompile applications" is not a reason to not use open source software.
If it ain't broke, you need more software.
It's obvious you didn't read the article.
RMS is suggesting that supporters of free software, when they receive an attachment in Microsoft Word format, request the attachment be sent again in a non-proprietary format such as HTML or ASCII text. He provides three boilerplate replies, mostly polite and one includes instuctions.
No where in the article does he ask people to stop using Word, nor does his suggestion limit their choice of wordprocessors.
In his suggested reply text, their is only a passing mention of GNU/Linux in the first and no mentions of Linux/UNIX in the other two.
Please take your ignorant posts elsewhere.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
Why study software engineering? Because 90+% of software work is done in custom applications anyways. There are far more jobs available writing order tracking systems and machine control systems than there are writing commercial software, especially now that there are only four or five companies actually doing that.
If it ain't broke, you need more software.
In fact, I believe that if you rename an RTF file so that it has the .DOC extension, it will appear to Windows users to be a normal Word document. Opening it will launch Word, which handles the file without complaining. This can be a useful trick for sending to recipients who require .doc files. You shouldn't abuse it too much, because it will inconvenience non-Word users who can deal better with RTF than DOC.
I have this problem as well. I explain to the person that they can use Word's File->Open Web Page menu option, enter the URL for my resume, and it will be opened as a Word document. (I have my resume formatted completely into a table, which makes it look right on Word as well as the web.)
If they are not willing to go that small distance for me, there is generally not going to be a good working relationship anyway.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
In the commentary RMS says:
Most computer users use Microsoft Word. That is unfortunate for them, because Word is proprietary software, denying its users the freedom to study, change, copy, and redistribute it.
Most users of Microsoft Word don't actually care about having the freedom to study or change it. Most don't even care about the right to copy or redistribute it except in making some limited copies for friends or to install on other computers. For most people Word works well and the issue of it being proprietary never effects them in any way they are likely to be aware of.
Until free software advocates can make it clear to the average use what the benefits of that freedom are, it will be very difficult to wipe out things like Word attachments. We have lots of people preaching to the geek choir and people convincing businesses of the value of open source (not free software, and it's an important distinction). But nobody is really convincing the average computer user of the value of free software (aside from possibly the "free as in beer" sense).
Simply responding to Word attachments with a political tirade isn't going to do anything except make the people who sent them to you think you're some commie wacko. The people who are likely to be receptive to such communiques are those who probably wouldn't send you the word attachment in the first place.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
At my old job, our engineering department successfully lobbied for people to stop sending documents as Word attachments.
Their explanation was a little simpler, which was basically, "Hi. Those of us with Unix machines don't have Word installed, so it's a major pain in the ass for us to read that document you just attached. Can you send it in a different format?" Personally, I wouldn't recommend using any of the examples in the article, as they all sound pretty self-righteous and would probably make an average recipient more likely to walk over and give the writer a massive wedgie than to change their email attachment behavior.
The drawback, of course, is that the people who were sending Word attachments in the first place were still composing them in MS Word. And so you've either got to deal with the huge mess that is Word's "Save as HTML" or you lose all the pretty formatting (which does sometimes include important diagrams or tables) when it's saved as text. But I suppose it's a moral victory, if nothing else...
"Do you expect me to talk?" "No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die!"
And by the way, you shouldn't be so quick to underestimate Microsoft's morals/motives. They're monopolistic and nosy and untrustworthy, granted, but they do make good products that are easy to use and featureful. It's naive to believe that they are into just screwing the customer over with every successful revision. If they really were that stupid and antipathetic towards the people paying the bills, I doubt they'd be the largest software company in the entire world.
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
How hard can it be to find a computer with Word installed? Is buying the de facto standard word processor that much to be asked?
In a word, yes.
The only reason you would NOT use MS Office is ideology.
Oh, and ideology is such a horrible thing. Ideology is what prompted colonists to buck taxation without representation too. I guess you think that's horrible as well.
Pragmatism is not such a wonderful thing. You can thank pragmatism for corporations who would rather pay MS license fees than save jobs.
Then I got a job and learnt that tolerance instead of shitty elitism is the way to go. Too bad RMS never learnt that.
Asking people to send plain-text or HTML is not "shitty elitism" -- it's asking people to recognize that they are non-proprietary formats that anyone can view on any platform. How is that bad? Maybe you don't like RMS' phrasing, which is understandable because he tends to devolve into hippy-ish terminology, but the ideas are valid.
Asking people not to send MS attachments, politely, is not fanaticism. It's an attempt to change people's minds. You don't like it? Fine, but don't call it fanaticism, because it's not. It's simply a viewpoint that's different than yours. He has a right to express it. If you think differently, (that he shouldn't express it, not that you don't agree) perhaps RMS isn't the fanatic here.
You didn't learn tolerance, you conformed. There's a difference. Tolerance would be understanding that the world is not fully comprised of Microsoft Word users, and that there are people who do not want to be forced to use Word to correspond with the people who choose to -- or who simply don't think about it at all.
When you send them polite reply that they should send normal email in text format, attach only pre-written documents if there's no way to convert into another format that engineers can read. The next thing you know, you get a review of having a bad attitude and you don't want to cooperate. And you know where that comments come from, right?
It's a royal pain in the butt when you have one Windows machine shared between 20 engineers all working on Unix.
Look, I'm a consultant. Staying employed requires that I make my clients happy, and part of doing that is making them feel that doing business with me is an effortless task.
Clients, unconsciously, have a scale in their head that weighs how much they've put into me versus how much they've received back from me. Every little thing I ask them to give me or do for me reduces their perception of the benefit/cost ratio, and reduces the likelyhood they'll use my services again. Really, clients generally want me to come in and pull a completed job out of thin air with no assets from them, and much as they technically understand that they have to give me stuff to work with they don't actually like it.
So, I make a point to bend over backward for the client on the little stuff so that when I do have to ask the client for something, it's always something that's really important to the project. Convincing them to support free software does not constitute "important to the project".
I can just imagine telling a client I can't read their Word file. They'll think I'm incompetent for being improperly equipped and replace me.
Like it or not I'm stuck with Word unless a court breaks up the Microsoft monopolies and businesses start using more of a variety of software. I can give my clients PDFs, but that isn't going to change their file habits anytime soon.
How hard would it be to write an MS Word virus that would change this preference when a document was opened?
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
1. Yes they do. That's why Word has patches and service packs applied to it. Word processors shouldn't have a programming language attached to them either, but Word has VBA.
2. Then explain to me why SQL Server, which can cost $5000 per processor, is closed. Stick that on a four processor machine, and you could have bought a nice car instead.
3. Not important to the argument.
I expect that for CAN$100 to $200, I am able to open up a piece of hardware and do whatever I like to it. I can take, say, the aforementioned coffee maker, and replace the power cord if the cat chews on it.
I can do the equivalent with OpenOffice or KWord, if I was sufficiently skilled. I cannot do so with Word, or any proprietary software. If there is a simple problem with the software, which I think I could fix given the source code and half an hour, I can't. I have to wait for Microsoft to do it, which they may never ever do.
That, my friend, is the point.
Is this post not nifty? Sluggy Freelance. Worshi
Here's a perl kludge I use to convert doc on the fly into PDF and open in acrobat from kmail:
/_/g;
/\\ /g;
#!/usr/bin/perl
my $fn=shift;
my $or=$fn;
$fn=~s/.*\/(.*)\.doc$/$1/o;
$fn=~s/
$or =~ s/
`antiword -p letter $or | ps2pdf - > $HOME/tmp/$fn.pdf `;
exec("/usr/bin/acroread $HOME/tmp/$fn.pdf");
It does require antiword which you can obtain from freshmeat.
My poetry site welcomes the unusual.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Okay, I don't necessarily agree with Stallman's point, and I definitely don't agree with his proposed responses to the problem.
But I did run into this ad while checking my hotmail account, and I thought it was pretty funny in light of the current discussion
A: None. The Universe spins the bulb, and the Zen master merely stays out of the way.
I use Word attachments every day. I couldn't do my job without them.
Is Word the best thing since sliced bread? No.
Is Word worth using? Yes.
The main thing I use Word for, besides all the fancy formatting stuff which is not even strictly necessary, is collaboration/reviewing. I write professionally, and I need to be able to track changes through several review cycles (editors, client, legal, publication). To my knowledge, no other widely-available word processing solution supports these features, at least not the extent the .doc format does.
But it's still not enough to make me use MSWord for all my editing (although I keep a copy in my VMware Win98 just in case). I use StarOffice 6 and love it. I really only have two qualms about it:
When I first switched to using Linux full-time for work, nobody at the office noticed. (I telecommute, so no one could actually see my desktop.) At the time, I was using Mandrake + KMail + StarOffice 5.2 -- the only one who knew about it was the editor directly above me, and he's cool with Linux. (Even he wouldn't have known if I hadn't told him.)
What I mean to say is: the Word .doc format has a number of very useful features I couldn't live without. But that doesn't mean I have to use Word. In Evolution, I can open Word attachments in StarOffice seamlessly -- and since StarOffice doesn't quite support VB, I've yet to find a document which could cause damage to my system.
I do agree, however, that you shouldn't use .doc files when something simpler or lighter (like plain text) would do the job as well. I'm involved with PR, and I've seen embarrassing things happen to clients when someone stupid converts a Word doc to HTML and posts it on their site. One page had internal tracking info in the title which actually referred to a different project which had been used as source material. On the website, this information was paraded across the title bar.
Tangent: why does Word include a "title" field in the document properties which it never displays to the user? Word's titlebar just shows the filename without path -- for me, a completely useless piece of informaiton, since I often have identically-named but very different files in separate sections of my file tree. StarOffice's title bar (which displays the contents of the "title" field) is much, much better... yet another reason to use .doc, and just not use M$Word.
Hey, sorry to ramble on like this.... just my two and a half cents.
"Anything is better than IE, and you can quote me on that." -- Wil Wheaton.
"And because Microsoft changes the Word file format with each release, its users are locked into a system that compels them to buy each upgrade whether they want a change or not. "
This statement is incorrect... Microsoft redefined the file format with Word 97 to make it extensible. SO the basic text, formatting, images, etc are all compatible between Word 97, 2000, and XP. I can save a Word file in WordXP and open it in Word 97 without any sort of conversion or downgrading... its just that the "extensions" not supported by Word 97 won't be displayed or might be displayed incorrectly.
The differences between 97 and 2000 are especially small... we have about 85% of our users on Office 97 and they exchange documents both ways with our other users of Office 2000. Of course they don't do anything special with fileformats (remember: these users think their keyboard can 'get a virus') -- the Word 97 users can open the Word 2000 files without conversion.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
( I've been critical, very critical of RMS in the past. My motivation for writing this post isn't to put him through the meat-grinder..I'm merely addressing some points that weren't addressed in his article.)
" Don't you just hate receiving Word documents in email messages? Word attachments are annoying, but worse than that, they impede people from switching to free software. Maybe we can stop this practice with a simple collective effort. All we have to do is ask each person who sends us a Word file to reconsider that way of doing things."
If these people happen to be your friends, sure. But any sysadmin who's worked more than an hour in any professional capacity can tell you that people simply don't understand email. Yes, to you and I, we know about RFCs, the fact that the email infrastructure of the net was never meant to handle anything but raw ASCII.. They don't know these things, nor do they care to learn why sending binaries via email is a bad idea. They just want to send 80MB
IMHO, what needs to happen is a revamping of the email infrastructure to the net, to turn it into a binary-friendly medium. Its a kludge to do anything short of that. Providing HTML links to binaries stored at the originator's machine, MIME, UUEncode/UUDecode are are simply methods of sidestepping the issue and putting a band-aid on a garden hose. As a side note, the same "effort" you speak of could be directed at revising badly out of date protocols like FTP as well. FTP is a NAT-ignorant protocol.. Good luck trying to move data in anything but an Active mode.
" Most computer users use Microsoft Word. That is unfortunate for them, because Word is proprietary software, denying its users the freedom to study, change, copy, and redistribute it. And because Microsoft changes the Word file format with each release, its users are locked into a system that compels them to buy each upgrade whether they want a change or not. They may even find, several years from now, that the Word documents they are writing this year can no longer be read with the version of Word they use then."
Lame as it is, this is Microsoft's right. If they want to, they can make Word pop up an evil clown covered with blood that randomly insults you every 18 seconds if they feel like it. Its their product. If you don't like the design of their product, you are welcome to come up with something better, as the folks behind AbiWord, KWord, StarOffice and others have done. In my opinion, Microsoft has done an exemplary job in allowing users to import legacy documents. Infact, you'll still have the ability to import documents from MS Works, a cheapo text-based version of MS Office that ran on DOS systems more than a decade ago. I've personally never encountered the sort of situation you're describing. Besides, if they opened up the standard and described how Word documents are formed, any number of parties (ourselves included) would ultimately pervert the standard, intentionally or not. I'm glad they keep that door shut. Theres only one version of Microsoft Word 2002 documents--Not 18 different ones, all slightly different from one another.
"Someone I know was unable to apply for a job because resumes had to be Word files. Even governments sometimes impose Word format on the public, which is truly outrageous."
The government also requires us to ride on/in motor vehicles when we use the highways, regardless of the fact your bike will get you from Point A to Point B. Infact, if you tried to ride a bike on an expressway, you'de be pulled over within minutes, fined, and/or carted off to jail. Whether we like it or not, Word is the standard when it comes to the exchange of formatted electronic documents. That may change. It has in the past, and will likely continue to do so in the future. Even today, we're already moving away from statically formatted Word-like documents and into more sophisticated markup-based documents like HTML/XML. Don't whine about not being to ride your bike on the expressway. Its illegal because nobody wants the disruption and inconvenience... The same reasons rest behind why Word is the current standard format for electronic business documents. It prevents disruption and inconvenience for everyone to agree upon the best standard available at the time the decision is made.
"Example No. 1: You sent the attachment in Microsoft Word format, a secret proprietary format, so I cannot read it. If you send me the plain text, HTML, or PDF, then I could read it."
If you say this to anyone in a business environment, two things will happen. They'll think youre friggin crackpot, and they'll be less inclined to conduct any further business with you. Get serious..The way to get to your goal, Richard, is not to retroactively repeal the existing standard in favor of ye olden days of document exchange. Develop a BETTER standard than Word, make it available to all so that they'de be crazy not to implement it, and in so doing force Microsoft to conform to it. After all, they had to do so with HTML, did they not? And JPEG? And GIF? And DivX, and MPEG, and Java...the list goes on and on.. None of these formats were created by Microsoft, yet, Microsoft was forced into adopting support for them simply due to their popularity and pervasiveness. BMP didn't win out over JPEG. PCX didn't win out over GIF. Get the picture? The best way to get where you wanna go is to put one foot infront of the other and enjoy the slow march of progress and adaptation, not to turn around and do backwards somersaults of disruption till you get there.
This argument was terribly misguided. It identifies a problem that doesn't exist, and suggests and equally pointless and disruptive method of fixing it. I didn't buy a CueCat then, and I'm sure as hell not gonna buy a CueCat now.
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
I once received a email with an attachment.
The attachment was a ZIP file;
The ZIP file contained a powerpoint presentation;
The presentation had a single slide;
The only thing on the slide was a BMP picture;
The picture consisted of a scanned image
Of...
a printed email message!