[SGVLUG] Mass. open formats meeting

[David Lawyer]

On Sat, Sep 24, 2005 at 01:35:11AM -0700, Dustin wrote:
> Groklaw has links to an audio recording of a meeting about the 
> Massachusetts Open Document decision:
> 
> http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20050922020430117
>From this url I was able to read a summary of what was said.
Massachusetts appears to be opting for Open Document standards for
state government use.

This is only one state out of 50.  Let's hope that some others will
reject proprietary format too.  But I'm not familiar with Open
Document standards.  It uses XML which is hard to work with in source
documents (with all the tags).  XML requires both opening and closing
tags while SGML is much more permissive.  For example, LinuxDoc SGML
allows only opening tags in many cases, and other cases (like
paragraphs delimited by blank lines) require no tags at all.

So while I may be critical of the Open Document standards, I'm am much
more critical of any proprietary standards like MS's.  I think that
Mass. should add just plain text, such as this email, to their
standard.  Does Open Document include plain text in ASCII or the 8-bit
W. European extension of ASCII?

			David Lawyer