4 ms·
A lot of the interest in mandating open standards, at least a few years ago, was targeted at the dominance of MS Office. That's interesting nowadays because: -
by nxc18 10y ago
A lot of the interest in mandating open standards, at least a few years ago, was targeted at the dominance of MS Office. That's interesting nowadays because:
- MS Office's default file formats are open standards with open source libraries/ reference implementations
- MS Office (both desktop and web app) can handle ODF very well nowadays.
At least for small business and home users, Google docs has become increasingly dominant with surprisingly little concern for long-term document accessibility. For example, Google Drive will only sync down links to Google doc files on desktop. Aside from manually exporting every single document you have in the preferred format, there is no way to get your documents for backup/archival purposes, and good luck switching to another service/software. It would be nice to see a little interest in standards/compatibility for google docs now that so many businesses use it.
- tremon 10y agowith open source libraries/ reference implementations Citation needed? FAFAIK the reference implementation is closed source, and there are no libraries -- only a powershell module that is actually a wrapper around the Word/Excel OLE objects.
- christophilus 10y agoI agree with this. Even if MS formats were all proprietary, proprietary formats can generally be hacked/decoded/understood. Closed remote storage services on the other hand, can hold your data hostage, and there's not much you can do about it.
- bilch 10y ago> there is no way to get your documents for backup/archival purposes https://myaccount.google.com/privacy#takeout https://myaccount.google.com/privacy#takeout
- slim 10y agoMicrosoft can can change that format anytime and break your opensource tools
- novaleaf 10y agothe point isn't about .docx, it's about .odf, the point of which is that any given vendor can't go change it whenever they want.
- noobiemcfoob 10y agoI've come to accept that any data not stored as plain text is subject to these format issues. The reality is we know it's not always terribly important. If you really want to preserve something, you'd use a format like markdown or LaTeX at the outside. Most things are weren't the effort, and I just want it to look pretty.