On Fri, 9 Mar 2001, Kevin R. Bullock wrote:

> On Fri, 9 Mar 2001, Troy Johnson wrote:
> 
> > Most proprietary formats are pretty lame for a variety of reasons. Why
> > don't we have a "universal document format" open standard at this time
> > in our technological development? Is it really such a tech "hotbed"
> > and advancing at too fast a rate?
> 
> So why are we sitting around bitching instead of designing an open,
> universal format that can kick Adobe's proprietary butt? I don't think
> such a project would be beyond our collective knowledge. New TCLUG open
> source development project, anyone? :)

Because its not the format that's the problem.  Heck, its probably been
done, but that doesn't mean we couldn't come up with a nifty one.  

There are two parts to this sort of deal:  standards and compliance.  
Standards are easy to write.  But how are you going to enforce compliance,
especially with M$ and Adobe and their "cattle"-base refusing or unable to
tickle the grey matter for half a second in a row?  This has been bemoaned
a little in other matters on this list in the last couple of msgs.

I suppose you could always tell people that until they stop sending you
things in proprietary formats, you're going to continue writing all your
Post-It notes and phone messages in anagrams, ( or ASCII). ;)  

Geek joke:  that's known as an 01001001 for an "I".  (Extra credit --
convert to EBCDIC, closed book, no calculators.)

Cheers,
Phil

-- 
"To misattribute a quote is unforgivable." --Anonymous