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Massachusetts Adopting 'Open Format' Software
XopherMV writes "A Massachusetts state senator who had complained about the state government's effort to promote open-source software at the expense of proprietary software has hailed the state's effort to reach a compromise over future software purchases by the state. The latest iteration of the state's policy emphasizes 'Open Formats' such as TXT, RTF, HTM, PDF, and XML." And if file formats for state use must be in truly open and free formats, then it matters much less what OS or application is used to create or open them. (On the other hand, XML and other TLAs don't always mean free or open formats.)
PDF is an open format. The specifications are available for free download and no license fee is required to implement it. It is controlled by a single entity (Adobe), rather than by a committee (e.g. the w3c), but it is no less open.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
While developers could create obfuscated DTDs or encrypt their data in a proprietary manner, they would lose most of the benefits of using XML.
I think you're missing what Microsoft would consider the benefits of XML. Namely, that they could create obfuscated DTDs and encrypt their data in a proprietary manner while still using it, thus convincing the masses that they're using an open format while not actually using one. They're actually doing this with their html exporter now.
Another thing they like to do is put bugs and workarounds into their code that no one else knows about (of course, they only do this in places they own the marketshare). Their RTF encoder is riddled with these.
So...I think the only fair thing to do is to make an open format and make the government-approved reference implementation open source.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Google is your friend. The complete PDF specification is available for download from Adobe's website.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
HTM is the filename suffix that broken operating systems like Windows used to assign to HTML files. The document format is called HTML.
For those you interested you can check the PDF Reference.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Have you tried this? On a recent trip for work, my company laptop had Word XP (2002) installed, the machines at the client site used Word 97. There were no problems whatsoever with compatibility.
Office is generally pretty good with forward and backwards compatibility.
Boston City Council sends by email public hearings notices for council committees like the Human Rights Committee. But our Boston City Council is unwilling to send the email as plain ASCII text instead of the .doc formatted public notices that are not so compatible.
Maybe they want to preserve enbolded text as if that enbolded text was some sort of legal document. Maybe they want to preserve the image of a seal of the city. At the expense of wider more compatible distribution of important information our city council is even unwilling to put the full text of public hearings notices on the web site at http://cityofboston.gov/citycouncil
An online calendar at the website does list the meetings minimally with no details. The full explanation for the purpose for holding the public hearing needs to be posted every time with an archive for reviewing past hearings.
So much for a mandate of so called e-government !
Actually, Microsoft Office's XML exporter has two or three different behaviors depending on which version is used. IIRC, only the Professional and Enterprise editions export clean XML while the Personal editions only save in some proprietary description.
Artificial market segmentation appears to have become a primary hobby at Microsoft. First there was XP Home and Pro but now there is also Starter, MediaCenter and TabletPC editions. It really bugs me how MS labels the standard edition "Pro" and how it artificially cripples all other editions only for product "diversification" and the ability to ask $200 more for the standard edition.
You must be using extremely simple documents... basically plain text. My supervisor and his other grad students use different versions of Word (I'm not sure which one), but all the the figure positions, get screwed up, equations get put everywhere, and it's a general mess. I manage to maintain compatibily with both of those guys by not using Word but OpenOffice instead. It's actually this lack of compatibility between Word versions that got one of the other grad students to switch to OpenOffice, which was better at handling different versions of Word documents than Word itself.
I like my dinosaurs feathery, and my pterosaurs hairy (or is it pycnofibery?)
i've just tried opening a Word 5.0 Document in Word 2003 and it wont work.
.docs but this wont install on 2003 (but it works fine with 2003)
there is a Converter Pack from Ms for those ancient
so no, Word 1.0 file formats are not even close to being compatible with the current version
A .TXT file is nothing more and nothing less than a plain text file. Ironically, it's only because of MS, champion of closed standards, that using the .TXT extension for these files has now become a de facto convention, but in the DOS age, other extensions such as .DOC or extensions that were basically part of the name (like README.1ST) or the total absence of an extension were also very common.
Obligatory disclaimer: I wrote this humble file formats FAQ and it represents my personal and professional opinion (not necessarily my employer's).
That said, can someone in MA please ask the movers and shakers there to read that document? It's probably in the class of "common sense" to most of us here, but clearly we've done a less than stellar job so far of imparting this clarity to those in political circles.
For the impatient: the conclusion I reached is that RTF and PDF are very questionable if you want to use them as truly interchangeable formats in a heterogeneous environment. This is an empirical finding, based on real life experience.
-- This
Of course, there's also the typical Beacon Hill power struggle aspect to this. If Gov. Romney wants OSS, then Democrats must find something to oppose in it. FWIW, I'm a Mass. Dem., but not in Pacheco's district.
I think mandating open formats, if managed thoughtfully to discourage large chunks of inscrutable binary, is a very nice compromise.
Employers should be more accepting of PDFs because of formatting issues, and because of the potential macro viruses. I have Word97, but I really resent the assumption that I have spent money on a particular program.
I am absolutely shocked that somebody would actually think this is true:
if you think back to the old typewriter, you have to have a Carriage Return, and a Line Feed to get to the start of the next line when typing.
Obviously you have never even seen a typewriter. On old typewriters the big silver bar on the left did both cr+lf. Electric ones had a key (where "Enter" is on your computer) that did both cr and lf. If you wanted to overprint, you did the return action, then turned the big knob on the left to basically do an "inverse-lf". If typewriters were the inspriation, we would have newline and reverse-lf characters.
It's true that early teletypes using baudot standardized on the two characters in their communication. This is because the mechanical return action was so slow that if it started doing the lf after the return started no time was lost. The lf character forced a delay to be added so the system would work, printing after a cr would never work, the next character would appear somewhere in the middle because the carriage was still returning. You had to add delay nulls to get overprinting. Believe me, at 50 baud, if they could have gotten it to return & lf in one character time they would have saved that character!
I think on early machines there was a key to generate a cr+lf pair. Also every computer system I ever saw or heard of would convert a single key into both codes internally, you never needed to type it.
Microsoft could fix their system in one day if they wanted to (just change "write as text" to be identical to "write as binary" but leave reading alone). However it is in their interest to make sure their files break when used on other systems, though almost all Unix programs have been fixed to treat CR as whitespace because of this. They also have made sure the default application you get when you double-clicik a file (textedit?) will not work for plain LF, so that Unix files look like crap. Notice that every other program they have can handle plain-LF just fine, this is pretty positive proof that they did this on purpose to make interoperability look difficult.
Also, OS/X uses LF, just like everything in the world except Microsoft.
No, TLA is Three Letter Acronym.