Pro-ODF Legislation Loses In Six States

ajanp writes "Computerworld discusses the defeat of pro-ODF legislation in the states of California, Florida, Texas, Oregon, and Connecticut which 'would have required state agencies to use freely available and interoperable file formats, such as the Open Document Format for Office Applications, instead of Microsoft Corp.'s proprietary Office formats.' A similar bill in Minnesota was changed to study the issue instead. There was heavy lobbying being done in private on both sides with one problem being 'the jargon-laden disinformation that committee members felt they were being fed by lobbyists for both IBM and Microsoft. Although lobbyists would tell the committee one thing in private, they got cold feet when asked to verify the information publicly, under oath.' However, 'Despite the string of defeats, Marino Marcich, executive director of the Washington-based ODF Alliance, said the legislative fight has only begun.'"

deep pockets

[bl8n8r (649187)]

will determine the outcome. It's the American way.

Re:

[Kiba Ruby (1037440)]

Naw, that is when we relies on politicans who don't know nothing about a particular issue to make choices for US of A. Also, don't forget political spinning, only promoting their characters instead of their issue, etc. If only the population can be taught to resist such petty tactics and actually consults the geeks, the scientists, or what have you. The problem is we humans, are stupid.

Re:deep pockets

[jollyreaper (513215)]

deep pockets

will determine the outcome. It's the American way.

Very true. As Confucius say, "Man with hand in pocket feels cocky all day."

Oh shit, there goes my karma.

I'm not from America

[Tribbin (565963)]

OK, I'm from Europe and don't know too much about the different states of America.

But when I read the summation of state names that rejected ODF it rang a bell.

Are these some of the most republican states?

Re:I'm not from America

[stoolpigeon (454276)]

Connecticut and Oregon lean democrat. The post before yours is more accurate. Both parties will sell out for money. It's not a dem/rep issue - it is a problem with the core of our political system.

Keep up the pressure. Eventually, it'll work

[mollog (841386)]

I've learned by watching the big money interests; you only have to win once. And once you've won, there's no going back. I saw it happen with logging and other environmental interests; the logging lobby wants to log some area, they just keep trying to get the legislature to allow logging, and one fine day, they do. In, out, and the battle is over.

ODF needs to do this, too. Keep it up and one year real soon, they'll win and it's over.

Re:I'm not from America

[lubricated (49106)]

umm California and Connecticut are very demoratic
oregon is a little democratic
florida is a little republican
texas is very republican
Minnesota is a swing state.

Re:

[Volante3192 (953645)]

California has a Republican governor because the Democrats screwed up the recall election in 03. Gray Davis (D) was loathed by the state (having suffered the result of Pete Wilson (R) signing the act to privatize electricity...which gave us rolling blackouts and the whole Enron debacle).

The Democrats wanted to keep Gray in office, so their campaign was "Keep Gray Davis in office...but if you don't want him, vote Cruz Bustamante instead." That didn't go over very well.

By Nov 04, Arnold was very unilateral

Re:

[bzipitidoo (647217)]

What made Arnold very attractive is that he's independently wealthy and didn't have to sell out to any special interest to raise campaign money. Well, sure, there've been other candidates like that (Ross Perot for instance), but most of them have so many other problems it more than cancels out that good. Arnold wasn't beholden, was reasonably smart, wasn't extreme, warped, or insane, didn't have any deal killing hangup about anything, and could comport himself like a responsible leader. You knew that the

Re:I'm not from America

[mrchaotica (681592)]

But I would like to ask why, in a democracy, any organization should be deprived of the freedom of choice in choosing what tools they can use to do their work. Why should ODF be forced on anyone?

Because, in a democracy, all citizens have a right to access government documents. That includes Linux users, people who can't afford to spend $300 on Office, blind people (using specialized software), and people 50 years in the future (long after any proprietary format becomes unreadable -- try opening a WordStar or Word/DOS document in Word 2007 and see how far you get, for example).

Proprietary formats -- all proprietary formats, without exception -- cannot fulfill this requirement by definition.

(Incidentally, Office-type formats are really the least of our worries. Government should be prohibited from accepting building plans in the form of proprietary AutoCAD DWG files, etc. too.)

Re:

[Propagandhi (570791)]

California - Not even close.
Florida - Not sure about the state legislature, but this is a swing state.
Texas - Heavily Republican.
Oregon - Blue state, although no California...
Connecticut - Blue again.
Minnesota - Last I lived there house was red, senate blue.. pretty much a toss up at the state level.

Technology issues aren't a Democrat V. Republican thing in the states, both sides are equally ignorant and more than willing to listen to the money. They just kind of assume that MS or whomever is talking to th

Re:

[CarpetShark (865376)]

This isn't a democrat vs. republican thing. It's a corrupt vs. other thing.

Don't Worry

[stoolpigeon (454276)]

If McCain wins and puts Ballmer in his cabinet, I'm sure all this will get straightened out.

Re:Don't Worry

[smitty_one_each (243267)]

I mean, the overall scope creep of the US Government is breathtaking, but do you really think we'll see a Department of Furniture Flinging? I don't think even Mirthless Murtha could support that, unless it were headquartered in his district, of course.

Write to your reps

[daeg (828071)]

Write to your reps. Most of them are completely clueless and have been fed unhealthy amounts of FUD that programs like Microsoft Office couldn't be used. They can, in fact, be used, and if an entire state government were to commit to using them in such a manner, Microsoft would be forced to provide improved support or lose them entirely to OpenOffice or alternatives.

Re:Write to your reps

[Timesprout (579035)]

If you bothered to RTFA you would have noticed that the Reps admit to being technically clueless and correctly point out that they should not be choosing technical formats. Secondly both sides were outputting unhealthy amounts of FUD with IBM FUD in particular identified as being very negative after IBM were apparently deliberately disingenuous about the situation with ODF in Massachusetts. Then there will always be the cost issue with matters like this which decision makers will generally tend to shun away from because they want to spend the budget on programs more likely to get them elected next time round.

Re:Write to your reps

[CastrTroy (595695)]

You're right, they shouldn't be choosing technical formats. But what they should be doing is setting down laws which determine what non-technical characteristics the formats should have. They should be open for anybody to use. There should be no licensing costs associated with implementing the document readers, and the specs should be freely (as in beer) obtainable. Other likely formats would be Adobe Acrobat, at least for read only files. I'd actually prefer this for stuff that you're not supposed to need to edit, as it ensures that the document doesn't have weird formatting or problems translating between different versions of the program. I'm not saying it should be ODF that governments release their documents in, but it should be something that's open to all citizens, not just users of MS Windows who like to spend $200 on an OS and $300 on a word processor.

Re:Write to your reps

[rtb61 (674572)]

So what you are saying is that ODF shouldn't be contested in the political arena it should be contested in the courts as a class action law suit as it is clearly and a fundamentally uncompetitive practice by any government to use a proprietary data format that inherently stifles competition and directly excludes every other company that does not hold rights to that proprietary document format from competing for and accessing government works and contracts.

If anything the losses in state legislature open the door for class action law suits and forces every corporation involved to put forward their views in public and under oath. So while it might be a struggle in politics it should be far easier in the courts.

Re:

[epee1221 (873140)]

I interpreted it saying that the legislature writes the requirements, and the executive does the implementation. Courts are for testing.

Re:Write to your reps

[mrchaotica (681592)]

Ever heard of the Freedom of Information Act? Governmental transparency is a prerequisite of freedom, and in a transparent government all documents, including "internal" ones, are potentially released. Therefore, all documents, including "internal" ones, need to be in open formats.

When you get right down to it, proprietary formats are un-American.

Re:Write to your reps

[CastrTroy (595695)]

The problem is that the viewers for MS word documents don't work on operating systems like Linux. Also, it's up to MS as to whether or not they want to continue supporting the viewers. If MS decides to drop support for certain viewers, then people are not free to view the documents. There's many reasons to switch away from office formats. Having all your documents unreadable except by programs released by a single commercial entity is not good, because they can charge you whatever they want to read them. Proof of this is that they charge $300 for a word processor. Something that hasn't needed new features for most people for the last 10 years.

Re:

[vux984 (928602)]

Despite their reputations, I suspect few in government are honestly going for that ever-fashionable "Word6" look in their documents.

But if some clerk used Word 6 back in 92, and that file has been in use since then, being updated by successive clerks, that 'do-it-like-Word6' tag is still going to be in there, waiting to choke some non-Microsoft reader, which won't know how to do it. It will then muck up the formatting of the file. Maybe catastrophically.

As long as 'do-it-like-Word6' and 5500 hundred other p

Fuck you. M$ is the bad guy here.

[twitter (104583)]

the Reps admit to being technically clueless and correctly point out that they should not be choosing technical formats.

It's not a technical question. The issue is getting away from a single vendor lock in that limits choice. I'm a GNU/Linux user and I can't do anything with M$'s new "open" format. Mac users are in the same boat. The new format is not "open" and legislators should be able to see the issue for what it is. If they want their documents to be readable, they need to dump the bad apple,

Re:

[Rakshasa Taisab (244699)]

I don't think most people can afford to write the kind of checks that would be necessary. ;(

Re:

[ajanp (1083247)]

Massachusetts is currently the only state that has a policy requiring the use of open formats. Ofcourse, just one state supporting open formats really doesn't mean that Microsoft needs to spend more money on changing their existing policies, it means they need to spend more money on lobbying.

Microsoft lobbied heavily against the policy in the state legislature, and advocates for people with disabilities complained that ODF-compliant applications don't work with screen readers and other tools used by the blind as well as Office does. Last year, Massachusetts officials said the state planned to adopt plug-in software that would let its Office users create and save files in ODF, enabling agencies to continue using the Microsoft applications.

Not practical

[grapeape (137008)]

All they have to do is explain that getting Office to output ot odf is not part of office but requires a downloaded addon, follow that with a breakdown of the man-hours required to get it installed on everyones machines, then top it off with a mention that there is no real way to regulate attachments coming from outside and this is DOA in any local govt. It's a nice idea but its just not practical.

So, MS-Office is a drug?

[mangu (126918)]

there is no real way to regulate attachments coming from outside

Just like cocaine... hmm, I see, perhaps you are right. But, wait, when a cause is worthwhile shouldn't we at least try before giving it up as "not practical"?

Wait, there's a difference

[mangu (126918)]

Yea, cause, you know, the whole "War on Drugs" thing has been eminently successful...

The "war on drugs" failed because it's impossible to identify and arrest every drug lord hiding somewhere in the South American jungles. In the case of office file formats, we know who they are and where to find the masterminds behind the stuff that's being peddled at the street corners.

Actually

[Colin Smith (2679)]

The war on drugs failed because people want them. That simple. Even if you were able to identify and arrest every single drug pusher in the world, from the bottom to the top, the market for drugs would cause new pushers to appear damned near instantaneously.

It's a poor analogy which doesn't apply to document formats. What's important with document formats produced and required by government is that they are a documented standard which will allow interoperation between platforms and which will still be reada

Re:Not practical

[cgenman (325138)]

All they have to do is explain that getting Office to output ot odf is not part of office but requires a downloaded addon, follow that with a breakdown of the man-hours required to get it installed on everyones machines,

Your client management suite should be able to do this in about an hour, including testing time. What, you don't push your software? Compared to the cost of 100 seat licenses for Office, a software push / update is trivial.

then top it off with a mention that there is no real way to regulate attachments coming from outside and this is DOA in any local govt.

You don't need to. You can keep going with Word for the time being for recieving attachments, but the agencies would be required to internally communicate and send out communications in a format that anyone could read.

The idea is not to kill microsoft. The idea is to push government agencies and the software suppliers that support them to use and create document formats that we have a hope of reading in 10 or 20 years (let alone 200). Can you imagine if the US constitution was written in Symantec Greatworks? Or if key data from 50 years in the past was written in GobeProductive on BeOS? If Microsoft adopts a truly open format that satisfies this need for transparency and readability, then that's great! But if not, we shouldn't be tying ourselves to them to fill a need they don't want to fill.

Re:

[jimicus (737525)]

Your client management suite should be able to do this in about an hour, including testing time. What, you don't push your software? Compared to the cost of 100 seat licenses for Office, a software push / update is trivial.

At the risk of being modded a troll, every time a proposal which includes "install this software on all your PCs" is made, someone pipes up with an answer along the lines of "But that would take forever!". The worst bit is they often get modded up as insightful.

Considering this is a site

Stupid Politicians...

[Tuoqui (1091447)]

I think we should make a law that politicians are not allowed to legislate about anything that they have not taken courses on (and passed). This goes especially true for technology but could be applied to other things like medicine, economy, etc..

Problem with definition...

[Anonymous Freak (16973)]

Developed or updated by more than one independent software provider in a well-defined, inclusive process

(Taken from the intro to the Oregon legislation, not sure if the other states are similar or not.)

Why does it matter if it was developed or updated by more than one independent software provider? As long as it is well-defined and inclusive, and follows the other tenets (not encumbered by royalties, for example,) then does it really matter that it's developed by one sole provider? PDF is developed solel

Where have we heard this one before?

[jollyreaper (513215)]

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then they crack open a can of lobbyist whoopass and defeat your bill.

All kidding aside, what makes this fight different from the usual standards wars is that it's not between two companies trying to pitch different standards like Beta and VHS or BlueRay and HDDVD. In that kind of fight, whoever wins, the victor is still going to be a giant corporation. For the buying public it's truly a case of same shit, different pile. ODF isn't just a product being shilled by a single corporation and so there's no single company to bankrupt or buy out so victory can be declared. I think this is going to be more like guerrilla warfare than a conventional battle.

I predict that there will be many, many more defeats for ODF legislation, especially in the US. The question is whether there will be a victory or failure after all those defeats. Microsoft certainly has the dollars in this fight. There's the old quote from Vietnam, allegedly from when both sides were having a talk after the final peace was declared. A Col. Summers had a chat with General Giap. "You know you never defeated us in the field," Summers said. "That may be true, but it is also irrelevant," Giap replied.

No matter which way it goes, this war is going to be interesting to watch.

Re:

[jollyreaper (513215)]

ODF isn't just a product being shilled by a single corporation and so there's no single company to bankrupt or buy out so victory can be declared. I think this is going to be more like guerrilla warfare than a conventional battle.

Last I knew Sun and IBM had lots of stock in ODF and where also the main Microsoft resistance. But neither of those companies will be owned by Microsoft any time soon I think.

Precisely my point. Even if Microsoft could buy one of them out, it is unlikely that they could buy all of them out. The concept of ODF is not just owned by one particular company but is a concept that has been adopted by them. The whole open source idea isn't a hippie commune idea the way detractors portray it to be: the idea is that anybody can use the ideas to make money just so long as they also give back to the community. It's about open source capitalism rather than unworkable idealistic communism, t

In the case of Texas...

[UncleTogie (1004853)]

Looking at the links for Texas, it appears that the two bills in question, SB 446 [state.tx.us] and HB 1794 [state.tx.us] are not "defeated", but instead just pending in committee. I'm not naïve enough to believe they couldn't be left there, but they've *not* been voted down explicitly yet...

Write/email your local representative!

Re:In the case of Texas...

[ajanp (1083247)]

Those are actually both identical bills. HB1794 is the House version of the Bill sponsored by state Representative Mark Veasey and SB446 is the Senate version of the Bill sponsored by Rep. Hinojosa. Based on what's mentioned in the article and notes from the hearing [state.tx.us], it does appear to be dead (until at least 2009 when the issue can be brought up again).

Mathers is chief clerk for the Committee on Government Reform in the Texas House of Representatives and is in charge of researching bills for the committee, which considered and eventually quashed HB1794.

"The committee," he said, "wanted a flat-out answer from the DIR. 'Was [moving to open document formats] something we should be doing right now? And did they need the backing of the committee to do it?' The answer in both cases was, 'No.'"

The article goes on to mention a number of additional factors including the animosity and FUD coming from both Microsoft and IBM lobbyists that undermined the credibility of each side as well as the unwillingness of either side to testify publicly. It's also mentioned that Representative "Veasey blames other factors; for example, he claimed that the reform committee has a historical bias against government mandates. He also cited Microsoft's tactics. According to Veasey, the software vendor cooperated with him on initial drafts of the bill but then refused to sign off at the last moment. He said said Microsoft also hired a top local lobbying firm that went to the expense of bringing in witnesses from other states and countries."

That's not to say you shouldn't write your local Texas Rep if you support either Microsoft's or IBM's position, but for now, the bill has been "quashed".

Seeing things like this

[Magila (138485)]

I am increasingly convinced that this country would be much better off today if our founding fathers had extended the principal of separation of church and state to also apply to private enterprise.

Though one could also argue there is no fundamental difference between the two. If nothing else Scientology has certainly blurred the line a bit.

Re:

[kebes (861706)]

I think we can all agree that ODF is a turd that can't be polished. The fact that it's "open" doesn't mean it isn't fundamentally broken.

Well I don't agree. Perhaps you can specify a few reasons why you think it is fundamentally broken?

I really don't know if ODF is the best open office-document standard that we could ever develop (probably not) but it is certainly very good at doing its job so far. And I mean that it does both the "office-document" part and the "open" part. With regard to being a good

Re:

[An Onerous Coward (222037)]

As the other guy noted, this isn't about the government regulating the rest of us. It's about the government regulating itself. Are you saying that the government shouldn't have rules about how it communicates with the public? Is it perfectly fine if some branches of your state government refuse to communicate using anything but WordPerfect 5.1 file format? Of course not. They should communicate in a way that lowers the barriers to public participation. Requiring that citizens purchase Microsoft Offic

No, OOXML is M$ only.

[twitter (104583)]

An AC has the nerve to say OOXML is usable:

your comment that only MS can use MS formats is a red-herring

Show me working Mac and GNU/Linux editors. No, I don't mean the pathetic half done Word readers from Novel and M$, I mean full working office suits. It's not because OOXML is not really Open. The people who reverse engineered the previous generation of M$ DOC are more than capable of understanding and implementing this supposedly easier format, but it's not really easier and it's going to take time

OMG, the AC Persists.

[twitter (104583)]

As for your link, it doesn't state that they can't unzip the DOCX .... blah blah blah

What it shows is that you can't get the text out, which is all the man wanted. How's that for Open?

... the specs are published in their entirity with the exception of a few minor obsolete things which should be removed anyway.

Just stop while you are behind! Those "few minor obsolete" things are people's work that M$ should have translated for them not thrown away. But M$ can't do that because their formats are mutually contradictory. That's why much of their spec simply states do it like prints of the old versions without further explanation. [slashdot.org]

The OOXML propaganda is bigger and dirtier than Mnt. San Diego [latimes.com] but will cost much more. You just can't wash this stuff and the truth will be out soon enough. Microsoft has wasted their time and money making yet another M$ only format and they should be punished by market rejection, not rewarded with state money.

Re:UGH! Open Formats Do Not Limit Choice!

[SanityInAnarchy (655584)]

OOXML is built in to Office 2007. The files are zips, if you unzip them, they're generally plaintext XML. Which is to say, JUST AS READABLE AS ODF.

WMV support is built into Windows Media Player. The files are binary, if you look at them in a hex editor, they're generally plain numbers. Which is to say, JUST AS READABLE AS MPEG.

Except not, unless you are a fucking moron. I'm sorry, but XML is not magic open interoperability pixie dust.

MS looked at ODF, but felt that since it didn't support some functions of legacy Office applications, they wanted a broader definition set, which led to the ginormous OOXML standard.

Nope. Nice try, though.

What actually happened was, MS looked at ODF, but felt that since it threatened their monopoly of Office applications, they wanted their own "standard" that they could control.

Or maybe they did it by accident. (Yeah, right.)

ODF was designed to be all things to all office suites. OOXML was designed to basically be an XML dump of MS Office documents, and from what I have heard (and seen), it's little more than a straight 1:1 conversion of the binary Office format into XML.

I suggest you go actually try to read the OOXML "open standard", and understand why it is neither. It has little to do with the 6000 pages, it's about how little is actually in that 6000 page document.

Now, you can complain (not without significant justification) that OOXML is a hugely bloated standard

No. We complain that it is not a standard, and not suitable for implementation in anything but MS Office.

due to it's trying to be all things to all iterations of Office

The problem is not that it supports all these various iterations of Office, and even older things (WordPerfect, etc). The problem is that they support these by creating some sort of tag or attribute or something which flags a section as being formatted for Word95 or somesuch, and then don't define how to do that. They basically say it's "beyond the scope of this document", and that you should emulate the behavior of the software in question.

And this is not the right way to design a standard format anyway. Suppose different versions of Word came with different default heading styles. You could just put <word95heading> tags around something -- or you could use a format that supports defining custom styles.

but your comment that only MS can use MS formats is a red-herring.

That's true, we can reverse-engineer MS formats, and have done so. Most open office suites (OpenOffice, KOffice, AbiWord, etc) support the binary Office formats quite well. But it's still reverse-engineered, and still not complete.

It would be entirely possible to make a document standard that is just as flexible, concise, and transparent as ODF, but support all of the crap that OOXML does. The difference is, it would be much more difficult for MS to support such a standard, and much easier for everyone else. As it is, OOXML is much easier for Microsoft to implement than for anyone else.

Consider that, in order to fully support OOXML, you have to actually go and buy all of those different versions of Office, plus random crap like WordPerfect, and reverse-engineer their behavior. So OOXML is not any better than the binary formats, because in reality, you may actually have to reverse-engineer MORE products in order to make it work.

Re:

[Shados (741919)]

Sorry, but I think you took my comment out of context. I did say that the open formats were fine, just that implying that Office doesn't have PDF support, like I keep seeing it, is a bit silly. And well, you won't need to upgrade computer either, since Open Office has always been pretty much slower. My 6 years old lap-top runs Office fine too :) AND talking about "tens of thousands" of computers is pretty irrelevent -too-, since after a few hundreds, Office comes at a flat fee for unlimited licenses.

So agai

Re:ODF is bullshit, use HTML

[KarmaMB84 (743001)]

The HTML as word processing format issues has been flogged like a dead horse for years. The outcome is always the realization that HTML is poorly suited to the task of word processing and a word processor would be poorly suited for writing web pages. HTML is for web pages and they're trying damn hard to move away from it for that too.

Re:

[dunstan (97493)]

Yes, but when I was looking at documentation formats in '90s, there was quite a bit of interest around SGML - this was in the days before MS Word was ubiquitous. The HTML DTD was created precisely to provide a structure for documents which were to be rendered as web pages, and it was Netscape who "extended" the syntax of HTML to add elements and attributes which broke the SGML standards.

The problem was a lack of good and inexpensive SGML tools at the time - though in its Novell days, an excellent Wordperfec

Re:

[SanityInAnarchy (655584)]

Try and explain to an average person why all the typing they just did cannot even be viewed in a Web browser, they will not get it.

Sure they will. In fact, they'll assume it.

Basically, they will either assume that they can't make it into a webpage (because it's a word document, and that's different somehow), or they'll assume that making a webpage is too hard for them.

However, if they have a nice WYSIWYG editor or CMS, they'll copy/paste from the word processor onto the webpage, and that will work. If th

WYSIWYG Harmful

[Dr_Barnowl (709838)]

What is really bullshit is writing documents purely in terms of appearance.

http://www.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/wp.html [wfu.edu]

Case in point : my wife filled in a job application last night. The application form was a Word document (as RTF, but RTF is just a different Word format). It took her about 3 hours, and the vast majority of the time was spent transcribing information out of her CV (also a Word document) and mucking about with the formatting. She didn't at any point write any new content ; the application just wanted the form filling in, and a copy of her CV, which contained most of the data in the form to start with. And this took three hours, lots of head scratching, brow furrowing and swearing at her laptop. Wifey is not a natural computer user, but I reckon I would still have taken about 2 hours doing the same thing, with most of the time difference accounted for by use of shortcut keys and my faster typing. I would not have been performing a different task set, since there really wasn't any clever magic that would have prevented me having to do the same thing and manually transcribe everything out of her CV into the form.

What SHOULD have happened is that either the form would have been aware of typical CV data, my wife would have had a CV written in a format that understands CV data, and a button click would have filled in the form from the CV file. Or even better, the job application would just take a CV file and a covering note. The process would have taken 5 minutes instead of 3 hours, and my wife could have gotten back to enjoying a glass of wine and an episode or two of Ugly Betty. Job applications are a well-understood application domain with millions of users, but the only support Word provides for a CV is a template that provides visual formatting and ONLY visual formatting.

When my wife writes documents she obsesses about the formatting during the writing. This disrupts her flow of composition and stresses her out immensely. I really think she would benefit from using TeX instead, especially since she mostly writes academic papers. But she's stuck with the WYSIWYG paradigm because that's all she knows, and she's not willing to make an investment in computer time to improve her productivity.

I used to use WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS at university, which was probably more productive than Word. A white-on-blue plaintext terminal screen, you concentrated solely on document structure. These days the vast majority of text I type goes into an IDE, a Notepad2 window, or one of the incarnations of vim. Using HTML, even in an HTML editor, would not improve matters for me at all.

The next great phase of office productivity will come from documents with intelligent markup that states what the content is and not just what it should look like.

looks like a bad law anyway

[r00t (33219)]

First of all, the use of "Extensible Markup Language" (XML) would lock us into today's misguided technology fad.

Second of all, "file format used by only one vendor" doesn't disqualify Microsoft's OO-XML. Remember, Novell will be supporting it.

Third of all, there is no exception for formats like MPEG!!! OMG, WTF!!!

Result: this effectively mandates that OO-XML replace PDF, with videos being embedded in OO-XML to acheive compliance.

Re:

[aussie_a (778472)]

Why not require the government code to the specifications of the language so that any browser that implements the standards correctly can display the website?