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.

-- 
   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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