Technocrat

Take away open standards, take away the Web

lars
Sat Jul 28 08:04:52 -0700 2007
Open+Standards.
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The British Standards Institute (BSI) will be voting alongside the other standards bodies this summer in the International Organization for Standards' (ISO) decision on office formats. The central issue is whether a single vendor should be allowed to control the format used to store, retrieve, display and work with data. The battle royal is forming even in the UK as a coalition of businesses, institutions and government agencies square off against a single opponent to an open, universal office format.

Ed. Note: By trying to slam through a 6000-page specification on a "fast track" measured in weeks, that opponent appears to seek to turn a technical debate to a political one.

Take away open standards, take away the Web
Uncle Entity
Sat Jul 28 14:20:47 -0700 2007
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The fact that someone produces a paper in pdf while slamming non-open formats seems a little strange to me. Did Adobe open up the standards or is it still closed with workarounds.

From now on, all ODF astroturfing needs to made available in an open format, preferably Latex2e, so historians can properly study this issue. We wouldn't want to have to revisit this again in 100 years.

And what's up with the article title? If MS by some miracle gets this passed by the standards body I'm pretty sure the interweb will still be around. Html is a well documented open standard.
Take away open standards, take away the Web
SamHiser
Sun Jul 29 05:03:00 -0700 2007
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You are incorrect, Anonymous Coward.

PDF/A is an open, ISO standard. Here is a little history of that process...
http://www.acrobatusers.com/blogs/leonardr/history-of-pdf-openness/

It is a non-editable format. It's specification is published and it is reimplemented quite freely in software; examples abound.

Do not confuse 'non-editable' with 'proprietary' or 'lock-in' formats. PDF is extremely useful for passing content one does not want to be altered by other parties and this is important in government and legal spheres.

the quote

lars
Mon Jul 30 01:02:49 -0700 2007
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It looks like someone **cough**AC**cough** forgot to read the article before posting.

the quote
Uncle Entity
Mon Jul 30 06:40:39 -0700 2007
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It looks like someone **cough**AC**cough** forgot to read the article before posting.

Wait, that's required?
Take away open standards, take away the Web
3dkiwi
Sat Jul 28 15:45:50 -0700 2007
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a 6000-page specification

How is this going to work? I am currently coding an Open Source RSS Feed Reader project that uses the RSS specification, which is only about 2 web pages long. It is staggering the amount of web sites offering incomplete broken RSS Feeds supposedly generated to this 2 page spec. 6000 pages... it makes me shudder.

And don't start me on Browser compatibility.

http://syndstore.sourceforge.net  to check the code...

3d
Take away open standards, take away the Web
Roy Schestowitz
Sat Jul 28 19:59:47 -0700 2007
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re: a 6000-page specification
This isn't even a complete spec, mind you. It's not free to implement, either.
 

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