From: Virgil Arrington Jr. (virgilarrington@hotmail.com)
Date: Mon Mar 25 2002 - 19:06:50 EST
Can I assume then that the bug I filed (2503) concerning Abi not saving the
font size code to blank lines in RTF files will not be addressed?
Virgil
>From: Dom Lachowicz <doml@appligent.com>
>To: "Virgil Arrington Jr." <virgilarrington@hotmail.com>
>CC: sanity@dog.com, AbiWord User List <abiword-user@abisource.com>
>Subject: RE: Abi and RTF standards
>Date: 25 Mar 2002 09:46:13 -0500
>
>On Sun, 2002-03-24 at 18:32, Virgil Arrington Jr. wrote:
> > From the Sane Anarchist,
> >
> > >I would like to have perfect compatability with Word, just like when I
> > >design
> > >a web page I want perfect compatability with Internet Explorer. But
>not at
> > >the loss of complying with the standards that browsers (or word
>processors)
> > >should be following anyway.
> >
> > Standards are nothing but man-made arbitrary rules, and they become more
> > arbitrary and meaningless if nobody follows them. I know none of us
>like to
> > admit this, but MS-Word, bad as it is, has become THE word processing
> > standard. I work in the legal profession and, while WordPerfect was the
> > standard for years with lawyers, we are now being forced into switching
>to
> > Word because our clients use it and demand that our documents be
>compatible
> > with Word. I can't very well tell my client that the reason my Abi
>created
> > document can't be read on his computer is because his MS-Word doesn't
>follow
> > the standards. My client couldn't give two hoots about standards.
>
>Defining standards as man-made arbitrary rules is a bit simplistic. More
>or less everything is man made and arbitrary in this field. The
>important part, however, is that there are standardization committees
>and organizations which formulate these rules, formalize them, approve
>or reject them, publish them, and ultimately inforce them.
>
>MSWord is the de-facto standard word-processor out there. Its RTF
>implementation, however, is not. RTF is a standard that we strive to
>conform with. We do not strive to conform with broken implentations of
>the RTF specification.
>
>OpenOffice is also huge (and growing in popularity), but their RTF
>implementation sucks horribly. They took RTF 1.2, branched it, and made
>all sorts of horrible incompatible hacks to it. They don't handle our
>RTF. Should we break Abi so that they work? I don't think so.
>
>I refuse to let our standards complaince fall to an OO level. We will
>not compromise our integrity to cover up another's mistakes.
>
>For the record, MSWord is highly complaint with the RTF specification,
>so I don't view this so much as a problem. Sure, it doesn't honor a few
>of the RTF keywords that Abi uses. But then it just ignores them, for a
>minor loss in formatting. That's a small price to pay.
>
>Finally, I couldn't care if your client doesn't care about standards. He
>should.
>
>Dom
>/Strive to bring others up to your level, don't sulk down to theirs.
><< signature.asc >>
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