Michel Drescher wrote:
I am not concerned of copyright, I am concerned of the following:
a) hidden, historic text fragments people may unleash (un)intentionally [see several issues where highly sensitive political documents unleashed that correct data has been changed to incorrect contents to suite the political party. Use Google to search for hidden historic content in Word documents.]
Since the document is still a draft, I'd imagine that the fact that it is in a format suitable for drafts would not be a major issue. I would expect it to be published as a PDF when it goes up on the list of public documents; that's just a mechanical format change. On the other hand, tools for editing PDF documents are much less common in practice than tools for editing Word documents.
b) We are (beware, I am wearing my GGF hat) a *standards* group. The Word document format in itself is not standardised. The fact that almost everybody uses it, does not qualify it as a real standard. To be honest, I really *do* prefer the OpenDocument format, standardised by OASIS. There are several word processors that do support this document format.
Surely it does not matter what format a working group uses to do its work as long as the group actually manages to do the work? (Note that I differentiate the publication of versions for public comments and as actual standards recommendations; those are fixed documents and as such should be PDF documents, the PDF format having a very good record of readability across deployments.) In other words, as long as we on the group can cope with Word, we're fine to use it for our drafts. Switching document formats *now* would be a bad move!
c) Word is obviously inconsistent in itself (is this really new info?), see this funny hyperlink example. Other examples are different document formatting depending on the printer used (and fonts available on the system), etc.
Is this a critical issue in a draft? Is there any part of the specification of JSDL that depends on the layout of the content upon the page? I'd hope not...
d) Using Word documents forces every author to use Word as well. This incurs substantial costs on all participants. While this is usually of a lesser issues for larger companies (who do have Word licenses anyway) private persons (who should be attracted by *really* open standardisation groups as well) are barred out except they invest in software. I find this quite ironic.
e) Interoperability (may also be seen as a subtopic of d) is an issue here. People prefer different platforms for software development. Now, as everybody knows, Word is *NOT* available for i.e. Linux. [Personal rant: Why bother, there are tons of way more productive alternatives available!] So you force people to actively *buy* Windows (or, preferably, Mac OS X) *and* Word.
Does anyone have a LaTeX style file or class that produces documents compliant with the GGF document formatting rules? If anyone was to work with anything other than word (the ability to import and export word docs is fairly common among word processors on Linux IIRC) I'd have to suggest that the only sane thing to use is a format that is known to be ultra stable and which produces very high quality output indeed. By contrast, switching to OpenDoc as you suggested given the current state of support for the format within Word (which, like it or not, is what a fair number of us use) would impose significant costs of its own. The advantages of LaTeX are that virtually everyone who has ever produced an academic paper has come into contact with it, and the format is known to be practically stable across long periods of time (decades...) All of which is completely moot for this working group. What triggered this rant? Donal.