[PLUG] Put an End to Word Attachments

Dave dave at pakled.mmcc.cx
Wed Apr 10 09:57:56 UTC 2002


This probably, should be moved to a private forum before it spills into 
something someone complains about. 

-Dave

Quoting Jeme A Brelin <jeme at brelin.net>:
> How is sending you a word document more indicative of information you
> really want than any other kind of email message?

Keeping the discussion on the topic of email, and attachments, rarely to people 
randomly attach documents of any format and send them to me unless I've 
specifically asked for 'em.  Ie, 'Can I see your resume?' or some equal task in 
function.

> It's not a refusal to play nice with others, it's a recognition of the
> fact that Microsoft refuses to play nice with others.
> 
> And, as members of the tecnical elite or the Free Software community, we
> are probably better informed about the nature of the systems used by the
> majority and, more importantly, more aware of the alternatives.  We have a
> responsibility to share that knowledge and help people to see the damage
> they are doing to themselves and others by perpetuating proprietary
> document formats.

Maybe it's because I'm not a purist and I don't believe that there's one 
solution to everything.  But as reality stands right now, there's certain 
accepted standards for certain things.  In the world of business, realisticly, 
if the word processing application you're using can't or won't work with the MS 
Word format, you're cut off.   Sure, I would love to see everyone using a 
decent, open standard (RTF springs to mind) and when in a position to, I'll 
certainly take a moment out of my day to educate a user on why splarnking word 
documents about isn't the most productive process in the world.  

Shortly thereafter, they will look at me a little funny and say, 'So I click on 
the *paperclip* to send an attachment?' and a small part of me will weep for 
humanity as I nod.  

> > Sure, in the realm of MS Word documents, it puts the open source
> > community 'one step behind'.
> 
> Good development time that could be spent developing BETTER infrastructure
> is wasted trying to reverse-engineer secrets nobody really needs to learn.
> 
> We avoid the whole mess by just using open document formats.

Agreed.  Except when I really want to read a MS Word 2150 (scheduled for 
release next week) document that some random-but-important person sent me while 
in X.  


> > But then, how many windows-based tools for (La)TeX do you see?
> 
> Plenty in the publishing world, where TeX belongs.

On a side-side note, I was looking for something similar to xdvi for win32 
several months ago.  All I found was some app I couldn't remember the name of 
that worked for win311 and 95 OSR1.  It'd still be nice to have, if anyone's 
got a URL or seven. ;)





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