As Linux continues to take over the rest of the world's governments 
office app market, do the computer world a giant favor and switch 
OpenOffice and the other office suites to a common open format document 
type or set of types all with the extension .doc .

sxw??? bleah.

Emilio Lizardo <elizardo@yoyo.com> writes:

> As Linux continues to take over the rest of the world's governments 
> office app market, do the computer world a giant favor and switch 
> OpenOffice and the other office suites to a common open format document 
> type or set of types all with the extension .doc .
>
> sxw??? bleah.

Wouldn't that just be a nasty sleight of hand of the sort we disdain?

There is no reason one *couldn't* adopt .doc, I guess, since there's
no standard of suffixes of which I am aware (except maybe a standard
for Microsoft's own OS).  But I'm not sure that this adoption of an
extension already in widespread use is a good thing.  It would just
cause confusion and irritation.

On the other hand, your point that Word's adoption of .doc for its own
suffix was arrogant is well-taken. 
-- 
"But he himself was not to blame for his vices. They grew out of a personal
defect in his mother. She did her best in the way of flogging him while an
infant... but, poor woman! she had the misfortune to be left-handed, and a
child flogged left-handedly had better be left unflogged." -- E.A. Poe

<posted & mailed>

jesseh@cs.kun.nl wrote:

> Emilio Lizardo <elizardo@yoyo.com> writes:
> 
>> As Linux continues to take over the rest of the world's governments
>> office app market, do the computer world a giant favor and switch
>> OpenOffice and the other office suites to a common open format document
>> type or set of types all with the extension .doc .
>>
>> sxw??? bleah.
> 
> Wouldn't that just be a nasty sleight of hand of the sort we disdain?
> 
> There is no reason one *couldn't* adopt .doc, I guess, since there's
> no standard of suffixes of which I am aware (except maybe a standard
> for Microsoft's own OS).  But I'm not sure that this adoption of an
> extension already in widespread use is a good thing.  It would just
> cause confusion and irritation.
> 
> On the other hand, your point that Word's adoption of .doc for its own
> suffix was arrogant is well-taken.

maybe we should just use '.rtf' (no... not that rtf... Rich Text Format)? Or
"embrace and extend" '.dok'?

-- 
Donovan Hill