Peter, (01)
> I respectfully suggest that you *really* check your facts. (02)
I certainly admit that I have not participated in any of the
standards efforts for OASIS and ISO on office products, and
I defer to your facts. (03)
However, one fact that remains is that Microsoft's version at
6000 pages is loaded with legacy garbage designed to support
many generations of MS Office. (04)
> ... but the size of a standard has never been a criterion
> for its adoption. (05)
Implementability is *always* a major criterion, and that
is inversely proportional to size. (06)
> ... if ODF had been made as a compromise with MSFT Office,
> it would have been a very different monster...! (07)
There is no reason why MS had to put their legacy stuff into
the standard. The subset that OpenOffice already supports
could be the starting point for a compromise, and that subset
does map to the OOO version of ODF. (08)
MS could have agreed to a standard at the ODF level and added
their own proprietary extensions to support their legacy stuff
(while *deprecating* the legacy stuff for the future). (09)
> I worry that, when people talk about ODF, they are more often
> than not referring to OpenOffice which *is* implementation-
> dependent and does not conform with the ISO standard. (010)
I have no commitment to OpenOffice (other than being happy to have
a freebie version). I certainly hope that OOO implements the full
ODF standard. (011)
> you should remember that backward compatibility has always been
> a millstone round the neck of anyone wanting to support large... (012)
I absolutely agree. But the standard should include only the clean
stuff for the future. The old stuff should be supported *only* by
MSFT for their customers, not included in any proposed standard. (013)
John (014)
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