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