On Sunday 25 November 2001 12:43, Rick [Kitty5] wrote: > at the moment the diversity of Linux is its downfall, why should anyone > want one killer app when you can have 5 half finished ones, 2 main > desktops & toolkits, several office suits
(none of which talk the > industry standard MS office) ad nausea StarOffice and OpenOffice read them fine, and Abiword is getting better. But MSOffice is NOT an industry standard. It is merely a de facto standard. Industry standards are things like ASCII, HTML and XML, where industry representatives sat down, hammered out a standard and published the results. A de facto standard is merely "what a lot of people are using at the moment". And that can change with amazing speed. When Novell cocked up Wordperfect's transition to Windows, MS took over the word processing market within a year. Before that, Wordperfect destroyed Xywrite's dominant position in the publishing industry in about the same amount of time. Yes, children, there was a time, long ago, when publishers refused to take anything but a XyWrite III file, mainly because it was pure ASCII and could be transformed into LaTeX with a few macros. Latest buzz is that MS-Office itself will be moving to an XML format. .. So brush up on those XML skills, it will look good on your cv! <g> -- Michel Clasquin, D Litt et Phil (Unisa) [EMAIL PROTECTED]/unisa.ac.za http://www.geocities.com/clasqm This message was posted from a Microsoft-free PC f u cn rd ths, u cn gt a gd jb n nx dmnstrtn
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