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Subject:Re: Standard Purity From:"Gary S. Callison" <huey -at- interaccess -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Fri, 29 Nov 2002 17:57:26 -0600 (CST)
On Fri, 29 Nov 2002, Andrew Plato <gilliankitty -at- yahoo -dot- com> wrote:
> "Jan Henning" wrote...
> | That is at least debatable. Word is very successful as a product, yes.
> | But is .doc used for anything except data exchange with Word? I don't
> | believe so, and therefore I would not call it a successful format.
> Virtually every word processor on the planet can read .doc.
er, no. Virtually every _current_ word processor can read some versions of
.doc. My desktop at home (office 95) and my laptop at home (office 97)
cannot read .doc files created with my desktop at work (office 2K). The
.doc 'standard', if you choose to call it that, changes every few years
and is not at all backwards compatible- most real standards are.
> Yeah - I'd say Word's .doc format has been successful.
If you define success as ensuring that your customers will be forced to
continue to give you money to upgrade regularly, sure. And don't think
that's sarcasm on my part, that surely IS a measure of business success.
It also annoys the bejeezus out of me. Fortunately, the last few employers
have all had site licenses and MSDN subscriptions, so it's no hair off my
teeth.
> However, committees do tend to be slower and less responsive to market
> whims. Hence, companies fill in this gap and extend and produce their
> own standards.
begin LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.txt.vbs
AIEEEEEEEE! Embrace and extend! Plaintext not good enough for email!
end
If that shows up as an attached file or a virus in your mailreader, thank
Microsoft for 'extending' RFC822. It's not an attached file OR a virus,
it's three lines of ASCII text that I typed into Pico by hand. Ergo: it's
not an extension of the standards at all, it's simply a broken
implementation of them.
--
Huey
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