Re: [tlug] The Great Mistake is thinking OOo is different

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

tlug@example.com writes:

 > Your opinion, quoted above, is in response to Dave's comment that
 > ODF is "still a great improvement over standard MS Office format."
 > Standard MS Office formats (pre-OOXML)

I believe I pointed out that _the standard_ MS format is OOXML.

Perhaps you want to use the term "industry standard" for pre-OOXML MS
formats.  However, I would argue that from my point of view, the fact
that those formats are neither commitments on Microsoft's part nor
published are the problem, when compared to ODF.

On the other hand, the two share the defect that they are both oomori
servings of YAGNI.

 > [Word95 etc] cannot be operated on with text-processing tools at
 > all.

XEmacs is not a text-processing tool?  I use XEmacs on Word files, at
least, on a regular basis.

On the other hand, the kind of manipulations you do with sed surely
require far more sophisticated knowledge of ODF than what it takes to
type "grep -n OOXML *.txt".

 > The recent ISO approval of OOXML has been frustrating and made this
 > a sensitive topic for me.

Well, although I was mildly opposed on the grounds of "one standard,
no matter how bad, beats two or more hands down", a Microsoft-written
standard was inevitable.  It's better that it be owned by the ISO.

I've been through that dance before.  In the late '90s Adobe was
playing the same kind of games with PDF that Microsoft does with its
formats.  It turned out that they took a shortcut with one part of the
standard in Reader, and it couldn't handle certain multimaster font
references produced by Ghostscript and later pdftex, better yet,
Instacrash.  Adobe was forced to concede that Ghostscript implemented
parts of its own PDF standard better than they did, and in fact is was
plausible that Ghostscript implmented Level 2 better than most of
Adobe's software.  It's rumored that this fact contributed to Peter
Deutsch's (unforced) early retirement....

I think we can be reasonably confident that Microsoft will pay dearly
for this standard.

 > Many people, however, simply want to use a word processor to
 > produce printed documents (but not necessarily typeset documents).
 > They want to be able to edit the document easily, insert images,
 > etc.  A word processor allows these types of users to get the job
 > done quite easily.

So does Emacs with an appropriate text/plain format (such as reST).
The Emacs interface is nowhere near as slick, but it's just as
effective and could easily be made a lot prettier, for much less than
Sun spent on Star/Open Office.

 > > Indeed!  My main point is that there are very few operators
 > > sufficiently skilled and talented to be able to take advantage of
 > > WYSIWYG.
 > 
 > I agree with this, and I think that I understand your point.  The
 > problem is that there are many people who do not want to become
 > skilled in the art of document production.  For these people, the
 > software is a tool to get the job done, and many try to do the
 > minimum necessary to do just that.

But that's my point.  When the minimum is an over-elaborated tool like
Word or even Word Perfect, I say the tools are part of the problem,
not part of the solution.  Why does such a user need rulers with so
many different ways to manipulate margins that I don't know which does
what?  Forty-leven buttons on the toolbar?  Multiply nested menus with
dozens of items in each?

A typical TeX document in a well-thought-out style requires very
little markup (unless you're doing math) to look very nice indeed.
And this could reasonably be hidden from users, with an interface
*less* rich than Notepad.

 > > As an educator, I despise the effect that cut and paste has had
 > > on students' original essays (let alone on their summary reports
 > > if based on web-based research).
 > 
 > I think that cut-and-paste has had both positive and negative
 > effects on essay quality.

Potentially, yes, quite as you describe it.  In practice, outside of
elective creative writing courses, I would be willing to bet not, on
the basis of 20 years of uniformly negative experience.

 > I do not dislike you.  Your email rubbed me the wrong way, and I am
 > sorry that my reply was so strong.

Your apology is accepted, and you have mine as well.