Re: [Fsfe-uk] Open Formats workgroup progress report

[Marc Eberhard]

On Thu, Apr 22, 2004 at 07:54:24PM +0100, Tom Chance wrote:
> public meeting, and to our boss/head of dept./leader. I'd appreciate 
> constructive comments, though not about the layout... it was a quick job in 

Nice document! Some quick comments:

I'd rather not name (and blame) one company in such a document. Vendor
lock-in through proprietary formats is so wide spread, that naming only one
company gives the wrong impression, that it is only this one company using
this strategy. So I'd rather write this in a more general way, maybe using
this as an example to highlight the point, but not the other way around.

HTML is obviously a well-documented format, but unfortunately different
companies have been pushing different extensions, which only work with their
browsers. Every web designer can tell you about the nightmare of writing
HTML code, that will look reasonable on all browsers. And most HTML code on
the web is not validated and usually not really conforming to the standards.

This isn't helped by products to write HTML documents, which produce
non-standard HTML. So, yes it is the better way, but it isn't working
without any problems and thus it seems a bit to enthusiastic to sell this as
a "solution". I guess, I would add something about HTML conforming to the
standards (which is a solution) and HTML containing extensions in an attempt
to undermine this idea (with obvious thoughts behind it -> vendor lock-in
again). Similar arguments apply to RTF and PDF.

Also as you mention office products, I wouldn't advertise PDF as a
replacement for Word documents as PDF is (for most people) not editable. I'd
rather compare proprietary office products with OpenOffice. The OpenOffice
format is well documented and can be supported by everyone. I would sell
this format as the alternative, not plain text, RTF or PDF.

Just some quick thought...

Thanks,
Marc
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