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On Dec 2, 2005, at 6:34 AM, Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:
> Which is fine for someone who can do all of that and doesn't mind.
> Other shops do mind. Good of the many pertains here. Good of the
> one is not compromised.
>
> 1. This thread is centered around the Commonwealth of Massachusetts'
> policy to pick a specification to be their standard word processing
> format. This isn't about what one guy does in his own shop. Think
> scale and cost.
And thus it misses a key point. When it comes to Office Document
formats, we're really talking about the WP/spreadsheet/presentation
trio. Of these three, an increasing proportion of text documents are
migrating to various forms of HTML, whether this is a good idea or
not, and the most important office-software component is clearly the
spreadsheet. While XHTML is increasingly plausible as a presentation
package (see S5), and maybe as a text-doc format, nobody is proposing
it for spreadsheets. So in the Massachusetts context, XHTML is a red
herring.
Having said that, I am coming increasingly to the view that if you
had an editor with a decent GUI, and (crucially) a good change-
tracking facility, XHTML could plausibly expand to fill pretty well
all of the workaday-text-document ecosystem. The Kool Kids want to
tunnel all sorts of value-adds through here and there and call this
"Microformats"; I used to sneer at this until I accidentally invented
a resumé microformat (http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/
2005/11/12/Resume-Blues).
Having said that, the jury's way out on virtually everything in the
text-document space. But I bet that in the year 2389, the Galactic
Federation will still be doing its budgets in something that is
recognizably a spreadsheet. -Tim
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