Re: Standards (was Re: Simple string conversion from UCS2 to ISO8859-1)

On 28/02/2025 14:52, Janis Papanagnou wrote:

On 27.02.2025 17:09, David Brown wrote:

On 27/02/2025 08:57, Janis Papanagnou wrote:

On 26.02.2025 20:50, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

On Wed, 26 Feb 2025 07:38:06 +0100, Janis Papanagnou wrote:
>

... e.g. the *.doc format was often named "de facto standard", but
there was a long period of time neither a public document of that
"standard" nor was it a standard in the first place ...

>
That is still the case.

>
What do you mean? - That *.doc is still a de facto standard, or that
it is still called so?

>
.doc has not been the "de facto" standard for a very long time - .docx
is, and has been for nearly 20 years.

 Again,

My post had been about what some folks call "[de facto] standard".

 It was not about specific formats whether they are valid now or have
been valid decades ago; it's actually 4 decades that we were confronted
with the MS phenomenon.

You said ".doc", and I took you at your word - I did not realise that you were being a lot more general than that, and talking about all MS Office / MS Word formats.  The issue is complicated by the fact that current ".docx" formats are real standards (albeit very poor ones, and the default settings of Word don't follow them strictly), rather than the "de facto" standards of earlier formats.

>
(To be clear - MS is much more of a "team player" than it was twenty
years ago.)

 Please discuss MS's role in IT with others, not with me. I'm fed up,
not only with their inferior software and designs but also with MS
evangelists mindlessly repeating their nonsensical ads.
 

I don't see any "MS evangelists" here.  But it is a fact that MS these days is much more cooperative than they were decades ago, when they openly used criminal and mafia-like tactics.  I am not a fan of the company or their products in general, but I believe that it is fair when discussing sins (intentional or accidental) of the past (of any company or person) to point out if they have improved since then.  Being less evil than they used to be does not make them a good company - but it /is/ an improvement, and it is not reasonable to consider modern MS to be as bad a company as old MS.