[Bradford] The UK Government Open Standards Survey

[John R Hudson]

I have commented that I think the survey confuses two issues: open standards 
for developers and open standards for users (one way of making sure something 
doesn't produce meaningful results).

I would argue that the second is more important because open standards for 
users enable people to share information.

The first is important because it saves development and maintenance costs but 
non-open development languages can use open standards for users; however, 
without the second, you cannot achieve opernness for users. 

John
--
On Sunday 24 April 2011 21:09:06 richard wrote:
> On Sun, 2011-04-24 at 19:35 +0100, Alan D Barnard wrote:
> > http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/UKGovOpenStandards
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > 7) Word (.doc)
> > 
> > Not a 'standard' by any definition.
> 
> yes
> 
> > It is the file extension for a
> > series of Microsoft word-processors. The actual format is not publicly
> > documented by Microsoft and there is good reason to believe that some
> > versions are not fully documented at all. The only formal definition of
> > the format is that it is that produced by a particular version of
> > Microsoft Word. Files are not even uniformly interchangeable between
> > different versions of the software.
> 
> http://www.scribd.com/doc/2252446/Word-972007-Binary-File-Format-Doc-Specif
> ication
> 
> > This format is no longer the default for either the current version of
> > Word or for the previous one.
> > 
> > R.I.P. except for the fact that it has been extensively
> > reverse-engineered and has served to facilitate document transfer
> > between different word-processors including between old and new versions
> > of Microsoft Word.
> > 
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> 
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