On 02/02/10 20:08, Wm Stewart wrote: <snip />
(Please don't respond to this post by trashing MS formats, the process by which they achieved ISO approval, or lauding the technical superiority of ODF as a standard. That is all old news, and agreed, but misses the reality of today, the opportunity at hand for OpenOffice to "embrace and replace", by being open instead of closed to the billions of MS documents already in existence and being produced in greater quantities every day.)
It is impossible to be 100% compatible with MS (or other Co.'s) formats as they are proprietary and can be changed at the whim of the vendor.
What the world needs is for the Governments to wake up to the importance of truly open standards. Things are moving in the right direction, as we have seen recently in Denmark and the UK Gov's Open Source, Open Standards Re-use Action plan.
Depending on one vendor's closed formats (and docx is not IS/IEC29500) is a sure way to never to achieve your [admirable] objective. Better is to send *your* contacts material in a really open format, such as ODF, and make companies like Microsoft implement these standards properly. But of course their shareholders won't like that much.
Al -- The Open Learning Centre http://www.theopenlearningcentre.com --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
