Darren New wrote:
> andrel wrote:
>> [snip]
> 
> I agree with all that. :-)
> 
>> They only seem stupid if you disagree with the (hidden) premises of 
>> the speaker. Most arguments are along the line of 'this is not how you 
>> define a standard'.
> 
> I primarily mean that most of the arguments seem to be along the lines 
> of "OOXML doesn't tell me how to X, so it's a bad standard", while ODF 
> doesn't tell you how to X either. Or "You can't implement everything in 
> the standard without recreating Word", when what's in the file is, by 
> definition, everything that Word can do. That's the sense in which the 
> arguments seem silly to me.
> 
> Sure, if your premise is "we shouldn't have to reimplement Word in order 
> to implement everything in the standard", then such arguments make sense.
> 
> I think what it comes down to is, given the standard, the arguments 
> against it are mostly kind of silly. However, were you to create a new 
> standard from scratch, you wouldn't put in the kind of stuff that you 
> need to put into OOXML to make it preserve all the semantics of current 
> Word documents. And most arguments I've seen confuse these two situations.
> 
I think most people think that MS should not have preserved whatever 
Word does but should have designed a standard for a text document with 
layout specifications. As the old Word files don't conform to the 
standard anyway there is no reason to put everything that is for 
historic reasons in there into the new file. If a government requires 
you to write a 'document file format' that is not the same as 'document 
your file format'. Of course the counter argument is that Word and it's 
files contain much more than just text and markup. Within MS office 
there is no clear distinction between text, webpages, presentations, 
databases, and spreadsheets to name a few. And the counter counter 
argument is 'indeed'.

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