[Bradford] The UK Government Open Standards Survey

[Alan D Barnard]

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/UKGovOpenStandards

No doubt Microsoft will be 'encouraging' its drones to tick all the 
'Microsoft Only boxes'. As a 'community organisation' we have the right 
to participate.

I have made a few comments below on just part of page 13 of the survey. 
It does show how clueless the civil servant responsible is.

There are about 120 questions and we would have to choose which ones 
affect us.

It is a 'vote' so I expect Microsoft will win anyway - but if we don't 
try...

Page 13

1) Rich Text Format as (.rtf) files

Rich Text Format is a proprietary document file format, with a published 
specification, developed by Microsoft Corporation. Microsoft holds the 
copyright to RTF and maintains the format. According to Microsoft's 
Office 2010 resource kit documentation, Microsoft is discontinuing 
enhancements to the RTF specification. Further, some new features in 
Word 2010 and later versions will not save properly to the RTF format.

R.I.P

2) Plain/Formatted Text as (.txt) files

Not really a standard.

The .txt extension is used for files with different formats and 
character encodings. Microsoft Notepad does not necessarily produce 
files that can be displayed correctly by other systems and may read 
other files erroneously.

Character encodings should be restricted to USASCII or UTF-8. Use of 
Windows-125X series of encodings should be avoided (draft HTML 5 
specification requires that documents advertised as ISO-8859-1 actually 
be parsed with the Windows-1252 encoding).

4) Acrobat (.pdf) viewer minimum version 4

Very muddled thinking here.

Adobe Acrobat is a family of application software developed by Adobe 
Systems to view, create, manipulate, print and manage files in Portable 
Document Format (PDF).

Adobe Reader is the current name for the Adobe PDF viewer. There are 
many other PDF viewers available. Anyone may create applications that 
can read and write PDF files without having to pay royalties to Adobe 
Systems; Adobe holds patents to PDF, but licenses them for royalty-free 
use in developing software complying with its PDF specification.

v4 of Adobe Acrobat Reader was released 12 years ago. (I think this 
version supports PDF 1.3)

There are a number of ISO standards for PDF, including:

PDF/A - the ISO 19005 family of standards. Used for long term storage.

PDF/X - ISO 15930 family of standards. Used to facilitate graphics exchange.

ISO 32000 is equivalent to Adobe's PDF 1.7

There seems no reason not to use these standards.

5) Open Document Format (ISO/IEC 26300:2006)

Unlike (6) below, this is an International Standard for a format with 
existing implementations. There seems no reason not to use it.

6) Open Office (sic) XML Formats (ISO/IEC 29500)

[Not to be confused with OpenOffice.org XML or Microsoft Office XML 
formats.]

Microsoft created the name 'Office Open' to create confusion in the 
marketplace - they have clearly succeeded.

Microsoft have stated that the next release of Microsoft Office (version 
15) will support both read and write of ISO/IEC 29500 Strict.

Support for this standard looks like being patchy at best. Has an ISO 
number but lacks a certificate of live birth.

ODF has much better support.

7) Word (.doc)

Not a 'standard' by any definition. 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.

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.