Hello everyone, I have been a member for about a month and I'm still "feeling" my way around. I am a somewhat eccentric but down to earth woman, living a simple rural lifestyle on a small island off the coast of British Columbia. My interests focus on mind, body, spirit, nature and relationships. I enjoy reading, music, art, humor, yoga,...
sure PDF is fine if the document doesn't need to be edited much later on ;)
- Mike Chelen
Yeah, I was being snarky :) And to be honest, DOC is about the closest thing we'll ever see to a real document standard, open or otherwise.
- Alex Scoble
even if the widely used formats aren't ideal, there's an advantage from rapid sharing & discussion, that can hopefully determine what additional files might be useful ;)
- Mike Chelen
.doc is only useful for sharing within a closed ecosystem. Proprietary formats cannot rightfully be considered standards. I insist on receiving open formats, and I refuse to send anything but open formats. People over-format anyway, plain text works for 80% of the use cases where people attach Word or other files. Aside from that, Word sucks.
- LogEx
ovigia: it is odd that some word processors like abiword still do not seem to use ODT as the default file type
- Mike Chelen
LogEx: since open office is capable of reading and writing .doc it's still possible avoid word :)
- Mike Chelen
True, other apps will r/w it, but that doesn't make it any better as an interchange format.
- LogEx
LogEx: yeah it's mostly useful for backwards-compatibility, sort similar to other fallback options like .txt or .csv - they are better than nothing, but a modern format presents more robust information storage features
- Mike Chelen
ovigia: that is true, probably they are in the process of improving and integrating OpenDocument formats. wonder how far along other office suites have come?
- Mike Chelen
I'm sorry, but when 95% of the world uses a format, it's a "de facto" standard, regardless of whether it's open or not.
- Alex Scoble
how do people measure usage statistics? they are more difficult to collect than tracking website visitor browsers. since windows market share is only 90% that would mean some non-windows users would have to be running word :D
- Mike Chelen
@alex i really don't know where you get those numbers since here in the EU, and several other countries like Brasil, ODF is the default standard; and NATO uses ODF as a mandatory standard for all members
- ovigia
Certainly Word is ubiquitous, but it's hardly standard. We used to use Word in med school and residency in order to pass on information at the end of the day to the on-call team, but ever since HIPAA passed, we ended up having to switch to proprietary encrypted web based solutions. And most of the on-line documents we received from the residency program, medical organizations, and the boards that aren't in plain text are in PDF format.
- Victor Ganata
ovigia: in the US at the moment, majority of documents on government websites are PDF, XLS, or DOC. it depends what is considered a document though, and fortunately there is a growing amount of XML
- Mike Chelen
Mike: well, here in Portugal our government is very, very pro-microsoft, so we still have to face the DOC(x) format, but we can already find PDF and sometimes ODF; In the EU sites usually we have the 3 formats.
- ovigia
Hey all, just joined up so i can hook up with family n friends and hopefully make some new ones! :) Go look at my cats on flickr! will post more soon! :) PS: anyone know how to link facebook and friendfeed, i cant suss it! :(