PoD wrote:
> Governments mandate ISO standards are to be used for documents so that 
> they won't be locked into using a single supplier for their software.

If "lay out the lines of text like Word97 does" is important, you're 
already locked in.

> MS forces their under specified format through ISO.

Yes, this is bad.

> Because the "specification" of the standard is incomplete MS is the only 
> body which can implement it.

Because the standard specifies so much *more* than the other standards. 
Obviously, for example, the standard has to specify how to talk to COM 
objects, since Word documents can do that. Yet nobody else is going to 
implement all of COM just to support that feature, even if it *was* 
fully specified, which it can't be in any reasonable way.

> End result - government departments are still locked into using MS office.

But not because of the standard being incomplete, but because nobody 
else is going to try to duplicate what the standard would specify were 
it actually complete, because you can just go to MS and buy a copy of 
Word for a fraction of what that would cost.

I mean, if you really cared what the word wrap algorithm for Word 97 is, 
it's not any less precisely specified than the word wrap algorithm for 
Open Office.

> As for the "do this like word97", the correct way to handle this would 
> have been to include sufficient algorithms in the specification to allow 
> a translator to convert old word documents into the new format.

You can. The word wrapping just won't be the same. Which doesn't seem to 
be a problem for ODF, since ODF doesn't tell you what the word wrapping 
algorithm is either.

> From what I've been reading it seems that MS office won't actually be 
> compliant with the ISO version of OOXML anyway so governments should 
> refuse to buy it.

Which works great, until you can no longer get out of jail at the end of 
your sentence because your government lost all the paperwork. Then 
you'll be all like "Can't you just splurge a hundred bucks on Word and 
let me free?"  :-)

Is there *any* SQL server that actually follows the standard? *I* sure 
haven't found one. Better get rid of all the databases the government 
keeps too.

It *is* a sucky standard, but that's what you get when you take 
something already finished and try to document the details that have 
been historically piling up over decades. I suspect it's a good enough 
standard that if MS stopped selling Word and you needed to move your 
documents to a new format, you could move most of the content to 
something else. You might lose some formatting, some active macro stuff, 
etc, but probably no worse than trying to move Postscript to LaTeX or 
some such.

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     "That's pretty. Where's that?"
          "It's the Age of Channelwood."
     "We should go there on vacation some time."

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