From: Dom Lachowicz (doml@appligent.com)
Date: Mon Mar 25 2002 - 09:46:13 EST
On Sun, 2002-03-24 at 18:32, Virgil Arrington Jr. wrote:
> From the Sane Anarchist,
>
> >I would like to have perfect compatability with Word, just like when I
> >design
> >a web page I want perfect compatability with Internet Explorer. But not at
> >the loss of complying with the standards that browsers (or word processors)
> >should be following anyway.
>
> Standards are nothing but man-made arbitrary rules, and they become more
> arbitrary and meaningless if nobody follows them. I know none of us like to
> admit this, but MS-Word, bad as it is, has become THE word processing
> standard. I work in the legal profession and, while WordPerfect was the
> standard for years with lawyers, we are now being forced into switching to
> Word because our clients use it and demand that our documents be compatible
> with Word. I can't very well tell my client that the reason my Abi created
> document can't be read on his computer is because his MS-Word doesn't follow
> the standards. My client couldn't give two hoots about standards.
Defining standards as man-made arbitrary rules is a bit simplistic. More
or less everything is man made and arbitrary in this field. The
important part, however, is that there are standardization committees
and organizations which formulate these rules, formalize them, approve
or reject them, publish them, and ultimately inforce them.
MSWord is the de-facto standard word-processor out there. Its RTF
implementation, however, is not. RTF is a standard that we strive to
conform with. We do not strive to conform with broken implentations of
the RTF specification.
OpenOffice is also huge (and growing in popularity), but their RTF
implementation sucks horribly. They took RTF 1.2, branched it, and made
all sorts of horrible incompatible hacks to it. They don't handle our
RTF. Should we break Abi so that they work? I don't think so.
I refuse to let our standards complaince fall to an OO level. We will
not compromise our integrity to cover up another's mistakes.
For the record, MSWord is highly complaint with the RTF specification,
so I don't view this so much as a problem. Sure, it doesn't honor a few
of the RTF keywords that Abi uses. But then it just ignores them, for a
minor loss in formatting. That's a small price to pay.
Finally, I couldn't care if your client doesn't care about standards. He
should.
Dom
/Strive to bring others up to your level, don't sulk down to theirs.
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