[PLUG] Put an End to Word Attachments

Dylan Reinhardt dylan at dylanreinhardt.com
Wed Apr 10 17:21:04 UTC 2002


Rejecting MS Word documents on principle feels like plain old fanaticism.
 RMS may be brilliant, but I think he's dead-ass wrong on this issue.

Some standards are defined by engineers, others are de facto standards defined
by widespread usage.  MS Word is one of the latter.

Word's format is not a secret, in fact it is quite well documented (http://www.myfileformats.com/search.php?name=DOC).
 Nor is it only supported by one program from one vendor... many products
support it.

Sure, it's rude for people to assume that .DOC is the lingua franca of e-mail
attachments... but is having an editor that can read this format really
any different or more inconvenient than supporting SMB networking or having
the ability to mount FAT32/NTFS volumes?

Linux may well take over the world, but it won't do so by refusing to play
nice with others.

Dylan





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