[ale] New M$oft Word file format

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Tue, 2009-08-25 at 10:26 -0400, Robert Reese wrote:
> Then remind them that it is unwise (and rude) to assume other people
> have Microsoft Office, especially Office 2007 (older versions won't
> open them, either), and also to not send the file in a format
> explicitly designed for editing unless they expect the recipient to
> edit the file.
> 
> And yes, OOo v 3.1 works just fine opening them.
> 
> (AND after you edit it, save the file as an ODT and send it back to
> them along with a link to OpenOffice.org) 

Honestly, I'd just send back a PDF, unless it needed to be further
modified.

I seriously just wish that people would choose to use reasonable things
as global standards.  Okay, so not everyone has a copy of some variant
on TeX or LaTeX, but everyone on every computing platform going back a
large number of years can read a LaTeX file.  If some poor unfortunate
soul is stuck with an Apple II, that's about the only format that
contains markup that they're going to be able to collaboratively edit
(after downloading it at 300bps from somewhere, I suppose).

Okay, so that's a bit of a crazy example, but one could substitute your
average cell phone for the Apple II and the same result would occur:
most phones don't have an innate capability to open document formats
(and some can't even open plain text files!).  My phone happens to have
a very bare-bones version of vi on it, so at least I can edit text there
after downloading it.

	--- Mike