Darren New a écrit :
>> And it's pretty
>> obvious why M$ wants to invent another one rather than use the 
>> existing one...
> 
> Well, sure. Because the existing one can't store Word documents. That's 
> kind of my point.
> 

I think the problem is that we should be defining a standard to store 
text documents, not Word documents...

If anyone needs a standard to store Word documents, it's right there in 
Word, just save the file :-) If there are parts of the standard that 
depend on this specific software, you might as well define the standard 
as "whatever Word is able to spit from the file" and be done with it.

As far as I know this is not the case of ODF, PDF, Postscript... Even if 
there are unspecified behaviours, they shouldn't be described in terms 
of what a particular piece of software does with it. But then I've never 
read the specs of those formats either ;-)

In this specific case, someone implementing the standard and discarding 
the parts "doLikeWordn.nnn" is not choosing a behaviour where the 
standard does not say what should happen, or not implementing an 
extension, he is plainly not respecting the standard.

If only Microsoft can implement the standard, it's not a standard, it's 
a file format. It can be the de-facto standard but that's not the same 
at all. It does not bring any of the benefits a standard should bring.

-- 
Vincent

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