Le jeudi 27 octobre 2005 à 18:23 +0100, Daniel Carrera a écrit : > Robin Laing wrote: > > > I do see Chad side of the argument. There is an ISO standard for date > > formats but many different formats are still used. Heck I have seen > > three different formats on one single form. People like to use what > > they are used to. > > Well, date formats are not going to severely hinder interoperability.
You're being as naïve as Chad there. Business processes depend on exchanging documents containing dates in a standard format. Now that ISO & the W3C have finally adopted a single format corporations are spending big money to convert to it (even on legacy systems in maintenance-only mode). Because the current mess is costing them even more money. It will happen before ODF is widely used and even if ODF fails. Home users like Chad do not realise the budgets corporations are ready to extend on standardisation, because even if the sums are pharaonic when you're bigger than a critical mass they pale before the costs of not standardising (and no a format linked to a single provider is not a "standard"). That's why they've created organisations like OASIS. OASIS is a pretty much a big corporation lobby that tries to beat sense in their software providers. That's why you find Boeing employees in TCs, and why any standard hashed out there will be considered more carefully by corporate buyers than anything created by software editors for their own ends. Regards, -- Nicolas Mailhot
