(j3.2006) ballot comments

[Bill Long]

Lionel, Steve wrote:
> The question is - what would you recommend as a widely-available and
> used alternative?  

What's wrong with ASCII, which actually is a standard?  A plain ASCII 
file is both much easier to edit and also takes up less disk space than 
the proprietary MS format.  It's very easy for people to define "what I 
use" to be the "standard".  Considering that INCITS is in the standards 
business, they should know better.

Cheers,
Bill


> Like it or not, most people consider Word the
> "standard" for editable document interchange. Word or Word-compatible
> tools are available for the major desktop platforms.
>
> Steve
>
>   
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: j3-bounces at j3-fortran.org [mailto:j3-bounces at j3-fortran.org] On
>> Behalf Of Michael Ingrassia
>> Sent: Tuesday, August 19, 2008 4:41 PM
>> To: j3 at j3-fortran.org
>> Subject: Re: (j3.2006) ballot comments
>>
>>     
>>> Doesn't Sun's free OpenOffice support reading and writing .doc files
>>>       
>> on
>>     
>>> Linux/Mac?
>>>       
>> Yes, http://download.openoffice.org/other.html#en-US has downloads
>> for Windows, Linux, Solaris, and Mac OSX.
>>
>> There's really no reason for INCITS to require Word, and it doesn't
>> promote INCITS standards.  Is there some way we can protest?
>>
>> 	--Michael I.
>> _______________________________________________
>> J3 mailing list
>> J3 at j3-fortran.org
>> http://j3-fortran.org/mailman/listinfo/j3
>>     
>
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>   

-- 
Bill Long                                   longb at cray.com
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Bioinformatics Software Development         fax:   651-605-9142
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