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RTF Vs. OOXML
Rob Weir has an interesting essay comparing the viciousness of RTF and OOXML: "The [document format standard] concerns of 2004 (or 1995 even) are very similar to the concerns of 2007... 'RTF is defined as whatever Word saves when you ask it to save as RTF.' This should sound familiar. OOXML is nothing more than the preferences of Microsoft Office. Whenever Word changes, OOXML will change. And if you are a user or competitor of Word, you will be the last one to hear about these changes. The coding of Office 14 a.k.a. Office 2009 is well underway. Beta releases are expected in early 2008. But are file format changes needed to accommodate the new features being discussed in Ecma? No. Are they being discussed in ISO? No. Are they being discussed anywhere publicly? No. By owning the 'standard' and developing it in secret, in an Ecma rubber-stamp process, Microsoft rigs the system so they can author an ISO standard with which they are effortlessly compatible, while at the same time ensuring that their products maintain an insurmountable head start in implementing these same standards. Is this how an open standard is developed?"
I like to smack fat aspergers indians with ftying pans! I outsource their children to tokyo wheir they put drawing pins up their anuses and inject heroin and sarin gas into them!
No-Niggers Protocol vs. the I Hate Niggers Real Bad System, the TCP vs. UDP of our era.
Computers do Input, Output, Processing and Storage. Its been that way for more than a half centuy.
At some point people thought it would be cool if that wasn't the case and dreamed up lots of crud to put in text books sold to college students and they made lots of money but hasn't changed a thing.
It still doesn't fix the problem that a word processor has an internal model of what the user typed. Its job is to output that in a way that is consistent with what it's showing the user and what the user told it to do. Now for some odd reason a large group of people come along and say "we want magic" and expect the input/output and storage models to be disassociated. How is that supposed to work? Remapping input? More levels of indirection? It sill doesn't fix the core problem.
To be fair, ODF started out as a documentation of the 'StarOffice XML' format. And it still pretty much is
That would be fair if M$ Word were developed in public as free software. It's not, which is why RTF, DOC and now OOXML (aka MSXML) were not and will not ever be standards that other people can use. They never were and never will be fully documented. The MSXML saga is proof positive that M$ has no intentions of playing nice, is still at war with reasonable standards and will to commit any crime to win. If you want a change just use software, where everything really is documented.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.