On Sat, Feb 24, 2001 at 04:08:08PM -0000, Óskar Guðlaugsson wrote:
> [...]
> By all means, no! That is, don't drop out of the class. Of course we
> don't _want_ to make it hard for anyone to read our documents!
Then please use standards. I don't know of any public standard
of RTF, for example. (text/enriched is something completely different!)
Use ASCII/Latin1 or HTML with Character entities. Prefer latin1
characters over Unicode characters which are neither ASCII nor
latin1 (still, many machines *have* support for ASCII and latin1,
but no Unicode).
> The formats available right now do not reflect any specific policy of
> ours. They reflect, rather, a lack of policy. The discussion about
> formats, by people much more knowledgeable about them than me, has
> left me confused. I got the impression that .rtf was the best format
> (please bear with my stupidity, I'm as much a beginner in computer
> standards as many here are in Old Norse), which was why I had let it
> suffice. The format which we had previously presented, along with
> the .doc, was .txt. The first lessons aren't available in .txt now
> because I haven't taken the time to convert the updated .doc files
> to .txt (it takes a little effort).
.doc is bad. Bloated and proprietary. .rtf is a bit less bloated,
at least theoretically readable in an ASCII editor; perhaps you
can even develop some heuristics to convert it to latin1; but
still proprietary. .txt (ASCII/Latin1) is very good (established
ISO standard). .html is also very good (established Internet standard,
w3c).
> [...]
> BTW, I'm getting the impression that Microsoft's position in America
> is somehow not nearly as dominating as in countries like Iceland.
> Lots of Icelanders haven't even _seen_ non-MS OS. Perhaps this whole
> issue is a cultural misunderstanding (?).
Now, there's an OS initially developped in Finland (not Vinland *g*),
and there're those OS with the cute little red daemon (parts by
AT&T, most parts by the CS department of UCB, still other parts
by the free open projects nowadays maintaining them).
Good thing is, they're open and free :-) Why pay for often
not so good software when you get good software for free *g*
> Óskar
Í friði,
Hannah, the .rtf/.doc impaired *g*