LL-L "Resources" 2006.03.15 (07) [E]

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15 March 2006 * Volume 08
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From: Paul Tatum <ptatum at blueyonder.co.uk>
Subject: LL-L "Resources" 2006.03.12 (06) [E]

Hi Ron and all,
As far as I know the purpose of ODF is to be an fully open alternative 
to document formats such as Microsoft Word and Excel files (I think it 
also covers other office document typess). The idea is that the format 
is not propriety to one company, and unknown to everybody else. Your 
hard work should never become inaccessible because you've upgraded to 
the latest version of your word-processor and the file format has 
changed. It also means that people can develop third party programs such 
as for example for word indexing or automatic translation, so a wider 
range of tools of a better quality should be available. Finally (and in 
the end probably the most important aspect), it allows inter-operable 
systems, because all data is in the same standard format, allowing it to 
be shared easily amongst different systems. Wikipedia, 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument, has more. I'm of the opinion 
that it is a "good thing" (TM), but as you say I don't know how 
applicable it is to the Lowlands-L. I already use it, but that's only 
because I use the Open Office suite instead of Word for Windows. It's 
not exactly something that you can "adopt" - if you use software that 
saves documents as ODF files, then you've adopted it, otherwise you 
haven't :-). The administration of Massachusetts wants to use it for all 
their documents,mainly because of the transparency and public 
accountibility which it helps to provide, which has led to legal 
shenanigans from those companies that don't (yet) support ODF, and 
therefore feel excluded by this decision. Interesting and important, but 
lowlands? The web site presumably doesn't use office document formats, 
being mainly HTML+scripting, which are open standards already.

Regards to all, Paul Tatum.

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