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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: Common Word Processing Format
 Which is fine for someone who can do all of that and doesn't mind. Other shops do mind. Good of the many pertains here. Good of the one is not compromised. 1. This thread is centered around the Commonwealth of Massachusetts' policy to pick a specification to be their standard word processing format. This isn't about what one guy does in his own shop. Think scale and cost. 2. This thread picks up on messages and positions that taken together make the decision in item one worthy of discussion. a) There should be fewer XML languages, or don't reinvent the wheel. Some of us are wheel inventors and enjoy that. Item one above is essentially the same as saying, "fine if you like to invent and sell train tracks but if you want to hook up to the city transit system, they have to be this gauge." b) Given a), the debate turns to the question of the 'best language for the job' because experience is that the wisdom of crowds ain't always that reliable when it comes to choosing a technical format for one job. No size fits all. c) Given b), the question is 'what is the job?' and that is hard to answer without requirements. The crowd doesn't always do the job. Many of the arguments against the Commonwealth choice center there: the cost of retraining, the cost of conversion, and so on. You might summarize those by asking, if there are to be fewer, what is good enough to be the one? Likely the one the most people are using today if one thinks the wisdom of crowds works for a format they are all using rather than deciding for one job they don't all do. That is XHTML. Neither OpenDoc nor OfficeXML have the reach of XHTML. Notice I didn't talk about 'open' once. Why? Because one discovers if one is honest that what is open becomes what is open enough, not what is good enough. PDF was open enough. OOXML wasn't. Will it be now? That is debatable. Is OpenDoc? Most assuredly. Is it good enough? Given improvements in accessibility, possibly yes. Should it become a legislated standard for the Commonwealth? It can be. Are there benefits? I look for cost benefits but the case isn't in. On the other hand, it will help the market to become more open, and that is the kind of decision that Senators and Governors do make on behalf of their citizenry or against them. Let the aware voter decide if this is important to them. So this is one part a technical question but that technical question is easily mooted by diluting arguments based on the scoping values of privilege, local autonomy, and simply, "so much smarter". The questions of market power and openness are not subject to that dilution. The easiest way to keep a monopoly or a dictatorship alive is to hold competitor's heads under water until they stop breathing. The only way to break that grip is to change the rules of grasping. There is nothing subjective about that. len From: Uche Ogbuji [mailto:Uche.Ogbuji@f...] I don't know why I'm even bothering with such a hopelessly subjective debate, but since everyone here seems to be so eager to crown XHTML for office formats, I'll pip up and say say: Thank GODDESS for the OO XML project, Microsoft's partially reformed Office XML format team, and all others who are saving us from the abject horror of having to contemplate XHTML as an office file format. Are you kidding me? All arguments for XHTML everywhere eventually boil down to arguments that rather than <monty> <python/> </monty> I should write: <div class="monty"> <span class="python"/> </div class"monty"> No bloody thank you. Freedom from naming-by-committee is what drew me to XML in the first place. I am not about to chuck that freedom for the very false comfort of a protean generic identifier. And when I hear people preaching that people should stop writing new XML vocabularies, I just wonder who's been passing out the XHTML +Atom-is-all-you-need Kool-Aid. I'll use XHTML for Web content, ODF for documents of more typical front-office style, Atom for Web feeds and information that is extremely easy to mistake for a Web feed, XBEL for links and Web resource directories (not XOXO-cum-XHTML, not OPML, not even Atom), and so on. I have great tools and technologies such as RNG, XSLT, Schematron and more to manage diverse formats, and I see no reason to wallow in a narrow markup dungeon. 
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