Subject: RE: Alternative formats for IDs

From: "Yaakov Stein" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 5 Jan 2006 06:57:22 +0200

John
 
Thanks for the thorough summary
of the cons about using Word.
 
I agree with much of what you say,
and am fully aware that Word is not the ideal tool.
 
However, I haven't had the same harrowing experiences
that I have seen described here on the list.
 
Just for the fun of it I went through a dozen
documents on a backup from 7 years ago.
All were perfectly readable, all but one came up
on the first try with the correct formatting
and figures (some asked if I wished to update the
outdated format, to which I answered yes).
 
Only one caused any problems. It was a multilanguage
document (with two directions) and some of the text
jumped off the page in a wierd way. But that text wouldn't
have written in ASCII anyway.
 
I have never had a problem opening an old file
with an up-to-date version of the SW. The problems
arise when you try to do the reverse. That makes sense
of course, since if you could do everything with the
old version, then no-one would buy the new one.
After all, a company with 95% market has to be inventive 
in order to continue selling.
 
Y(J)S
 
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---

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 05 Jan 2006 06:15:46 -0500

--On Thursday, 05 January, 2006 06:57 +0200 Yaakov Stein
<[email-masked]> wrote:

>...

Well, our experiences differ.  Let's put philosophical and
individual economic issues aside for a moment.  Let's also
temporarily ignore the observation that many members of our
community do their work on operating systems on which the
current version of Word is not supported.  I continue to
consider those issues to be showstoppers, but perhaps the
compatibility argument is worth pursuing a bit.   I think there
are two problems here, plus one raised in a note by Lars-Erik.  

(1) I have had problems opening and using documents from
sufficiently old versions, sometimes as recently as two versions
ago.  I even know the source of some of those problems.   For
example, I have never had a problem opening, in a clean and
unmodified current version of Word, an old document that uses
exactly one template and that one unmodified as if out of the
box, contains no macros and no workarounds for obscure bugs, and
does not use cross-references or a host of other specialized
features.  For the record, I don't suggest that any document
that uses any of those features runs into trouble, only that a
sufficiently complex combination of them do.  It has often
appeared to me that the machinery that converts from the formats
of an older version of Word to a newer one will handle the
simple cases well but, especially when the original document is
several versions older, there seems to be some tendency for Word
to get itself into trouble.  And, if the old document contains
macros or styles that are already present in the normal document
template of  the new version but with different definitions for
some of the set... my experience has been that occasionally
things work without side-effects.

For some of these cases, one even has to be careful about what
it means to successfully open an older document.  For example,
there was a considerable period in which a document written in
the then-current (not even previous-generation) version of
Windows Word could be opened just fine with the then-current
version of Mac Word... as long either the Windows version
contained no comments or one did not care that they disappeared
in the transition.

Now, you could reasonably suggest that good document hygiene
would argue for avoiding most of those features, or removing
them in the old system before trying to move documents to the
new one.   You would, of course, be correct.  But to avoid all
of those features eliminates much of the power of Word relative
to, e.g., ASCII editors that are available for all platforms at
negligible cost.  And those extended features, once inserted in
a document, are not easy to remove.  It is, for example,
possible to configure Word 2003 to issue a warning every time
one tries to save a document containing change-tracking or
comments to a file.  But, at least as far as I have been able to
discover, there are no warnings for macros, styles, and the
like.  And, while one can say "don't save", there are, as far as
I know, no options built into Word for cleanly removing all of
that stuff and getting a document into the safest of
forward-compatible forms.  Similarly, there is a configurable
warning when one opens a document with embedded macros.  But the
effect of "run safely" is not "remove all of those macros
forever" but "disable them in this session".  If they are
hostile and if, for one reason or another, the macro-removal
tool (which I'd lay good odds most users of Word don't even know
where to find) won't touch them because of how they are
installed (a common case), they just lie around as traps for
some future unwary person.

(2) If I understood correctly, one of the main arguments you
made for Word was its change-tracking and collaboration
facilities.  I certainly agree about the change-tracking.  But,
as for collaboration, it seems to me that you cannot
simultaneously argue that it is unreasonable to expect
version-downgrading to work and also argue that Word provides
good and useful support for collaborative work in a
heterogeneous community.  Again, even putting aside economic and
similar constraints, we have no way to get everyone in the
community to do an upgrade on the same day.  Even Microsoft
can't keep the feature sets in current versions of Windows Word
and Mac Word identical, if only because their release cycles
differ (nor are those versions bug-compatible, of course).  Even
if we could somehow get around those problems, few people who
obtain Word in enterprise settings are permitted to install a
newer version ahead of the rest of the enterprise, precisely
because of that downgrade problem.   So, to have collaboration
in an arbitrary IETF WG, using a single version of Word, you
would need to be sure that no Mac user is likely to be involved
with the WG (or, given the apparently-risking number of Macs
around IETF, no Windows user) and you would need to organize a
global flag day for upgrades.  Not likely, it seems to me.

Again ignoring a host of other issues, it might be possible for
IETF to agree on a particular, sufficiently-old, version of
Word.  But one can't do that either, since installation of a
current version for one's day job would uninstall and/or destroy
the earlier version.

--On Thursday, 05 January, 2006 09:26 +0100 "Lars-Erik Jonsson
\\(LU/EAB\\)" <[email-masked]> wrote:

>> Also, certain combinations of characters I use in ASCII art
>> cause (for some unknown and undocumented reason)
>> strange unprintable characters to appear in the ASCII version.
> 
> Probably this is because you have used characters not part of
> 7-bit ASCII. It is a good idea to always turn off the
> auto-correct features of Word, otherwise you will probably get
> strange characters.

Exactly correct.  But this is a symptom of another part of the
problem described above.  Some of the auto-correct functionality
is on the list of things that make Word attractive.  The "smart
character" subset is a serious problem for the IETF and
conversion to ASCII, but getting those characters is an
important part of the style manual for many organizations.  To
the best of my knowledge, there is no way to switch the specific
problematic options off entirely and then be able to turn them
back on other than with a checklist and stepping through them
one at a time, other than "logging out" and "logging in as
another user".   Back with Windows 3.1 and corresponding version
of Office, I could figure out how to exit from Word, run an
extremely small batch job to rename a few .INI files, and then
reenter Word, reversing the process as needed, in order to
switch out one complete option set and switch in another one.
But now the bits are scattered through the registry, often in
obscurely-named keys or hidden in parts of the directory tree
that Microsoft doesn't want me to look at (and that I'm in
violation of their license provisions if I try to figure out).  

Now, a solution for this, as Ole pointed out, would be a "save
in plain, ordinary, ASCII, with no non-ASCII characters" option.
A different solution, more satisfactory in some ways but less in
others, would be a well-supported ASCII output "text printer".
I don't think it is any secret that both were suggested to
Microsoft around the time that RFC 3285 was being assembled.
At least with respect to this particular issue, it is two
versions later, we don't have an especially responsive vendor,
and, as others have pointed out, "roll your own extension" is
not really practical, especially since the behavior of a given
version of Word can differ depending on the operating system
version on which it is running.

I will strongly defend your right to use Word, or anything else
you like, as an editor.  But, as a distribution format, or even
a collaboration format within the IETF, much less as an archival
format, I think it is a complete non-starter.  And, again, that
is even if the economic and availability arguments are ignored,
but they would be, IMO, showstoppers on their own.

Finally, as an aside, you made the observation in one of your
notes that you want to use Word because it is already installed
on your machine.  I don't know where you work or who sets up
your machines.  But if I go to my local computer store and buy a
Windows-compatible machine with an OEM copy of Windows bundled
in, Word doesn't come on it, especially not the XML-(sort
of-)compatible MS Office Pro version.  That is an extra-cost
option that can nearly double the bottom-line price of the
computer.  If I build my own boxes, or have them built to my
specifications (because I prefer my choice of options to someone
else's undocumented ways to cut costs and save a few dollars
while including capabilities I won't use), I'm in even worse
trouble: Windows itself is a high-cost option, and no Windows
equals no MS Office equals no Word.  One consequence is that,
while I use several machines in the course of a typical week,
the current version of Word is just not installed on all of
them.  Not coincidentally, emacs clones are installed no all of
them -- and their output formats are forward and backward
compatible.

I should also point out that, if you are running Windows, ASCII
editors _are_ installed on your machine in the form of NotePad
and WordPad.  They aren't my idea of a fun or easy to use
editor, but you can't claim to not have them.

    john

---

From: Peter Dambier <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 05 Jan 2006 14:16:49 +0100

>>in order to continue selling.

I have had that very same experience, only worse:

There was no way of accessing documents from word for OS/2 after somebody
had been reading them with winword. Winword cold, but for word for OS/2
they were lost. Only transfering them to CP/M 86 with kermit and processing
them with wordstar and then transfering back with kermit again made them
workable again. Dont ask what happened to the typesetting.

> current version for one's day job would uninstall and/or destroy

The problem starts a lot earlier. Never have I seen a word for
my old CP/M 86. Never have I seen a word for my linux .

There is an abiword arround but comparing abiword RTF files with
Open Office RTF does not look very encourageing. Why not RTF in
the first place? Word can read it - even across versions.

After all word documents wont pass firewalls. You can hide trojans
and virae in word documents. That is why many firewalls block
emails and html pages that contain word documents.

Many email filters say plain text and no attachements.

> editor, but you can't claim to not have them.

I remember a lot of people destroying there config.sys and autoexec.bat
files with both wordstar and word. That is why microsoft originally
said edit those files only with edlin or notepad. Never use word or
write or winword on system configuration. I dont know wordpad. It could
do plain text it could do things like word.

I know vi. I can even use it on an asr-33 teletype processing punched
paper tapes. Using kermit for filetransfer I can even use it on
punched cards in EBCDIC. Many documents have been produced using
decks of punched cards in place of an editor. Those documents are
still valid although I think there are html versions around today.

On punched cards and perforated tape I can litterally see what my
editor does. Try reading a perforated tape from a word document.
Of course you can use od to dump a word file. No need for punched
cards :)

Reading that dump will tell you why printers go into limbo when fed
with a word document. When you deal with data that has to be suffed
into max 512 bytes then you cannot waste your brain on documents that
use 512 bytes per character.

I remember back in 1978 when I was studying computerscience that
problem with documentation and typesetting was already solved before
Intel started building microprocessors and before Microsoft got
their basic interpreter running on those microprocessors.

Ever heard of TeX? It is still used by bookprinting companies and
by resaerchers. It does not bite ascii terminals and it does give
you readable access to the original source of the document.

How come those windows people reenvited the whell again and again
doing the same known mistakes again and again. Why not go into an
antique bookstore and by a book about Tex and LaTeX and then
download it from the internet. It not only saves the mony for your
original version of word, it also saves you the headaches on all
those fixes and patches and updates and different behaviour of
versions. It saves you the expenses on virusscanners and their
updates as well.

If one day you happen to be in Uganda and want to fix a typo in
your document at O'Reillies somewhere in the US but you only have
ssh and a 1200 baud modem then you still can do it using good
old vi. Try that with an unknow version of word in Uganda and
a 20 Kb overhead for an empty word ducument.

-- 
Peter and Karin Dambier
The Public-Root Consortium
Graeffstrasse 14
D-64646 Heppenheim
+49(6252)671-788 (Telekom)
+49(179)108-3978 (O2 Genion)
+49(6252)750-308 (VoIP: sipgate.de)
mail: [email-masked]
mail: [email-masked]
http://iason.site.voila.fr/
https://sourceforge.net/projects/iason/