[jsdl-wg] Final call on JSDL 1.0

[Donal K. Fellows]

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.