[odf-discuss] Fwd: W3C Lead on CDF says OpenDocument Fellowship Position on CDF Makes No Sense

[Peter Vandenabeele]

On Nov 15, 2007 7:58 AM, M. Fioretti <mfioretti at nexaima.net> wrote:
...
> Most others instead, including me, have come to the conclusion
> that this is really a fake issue:
>
> - That when you go to check how things really stand, that kind of
>   interoperability has never existed or been guaranteed, unless sender
>   and receiver of a document had identical sw and hw configurations

I believe that some mature open standards such as tcp/ip or SMTP or
DNS or ... _do_allow "near perfect" interop between very different
systems. What an improvement over the days that "e-mail" was plagued
by a myriad of different proprietary formats.

I prefer the slight disadvantages of maybe not 100% but only 99%
technical interoperability over the disadvantage of having to run 100%
of the same HW/SW solution everywhere. Eventually, even that 1 %
interop problems will be removed once this is the universal open standard.

We are just in a transition here, but eventually we will arrive at a situation
where any "standard" for document exchange will be an open standard
(worst case, we just need to wait until the patents expire ... like e.g. the
patents on gsm or the CD or ...).

But, we must be carefull to not end up with multiple standards divided per
region, such as "letter" in North/Central-America and "A4" in Rest Of World,
PAL vs. NTSC, 220V vs. 110V etc. I assume all _are_ open standards by
now (I assume all patents on PAL and NTSC have expired by now), but
even then, we continue to have this regional split. And there is a permanent
cost associated to it: devices must have a dual voltage support, printers
must be capable of "A4" and "letter" sizes, printing out a text that was
designed for "letter" on A4 will change it (and even "PDF" cannot magically
add 2 centimeters of physical paper to the sheet, it can only reduce the
image to fit the sheet, so is that "true fidelity in court"? What if the drawing
was in PDF, the floorplan, on 1:100 scale. of a chalet in Switzerland you
bought and the chalet is 5% smaller in all sizes, because it was printed on
A4 instead of letter paper ?). I still have transformers in my house to run my
110 V devices in a local 220 V network. Game consoles output NTSC or
PAL, to the TV etc. etc.

What can we do to avoid such a split haunting us for the coming 100 years?

If one standard is open and the other not, than the case seems simple, the
open standard will win eventually if the technical merits are similar. But what
if 2 _really_ open standards would come into existance? Quite a nightmare,
especially with increased globalization of economy, culture, politics, ...

That is IMO a very fundamental problem that needs to be addressed.

Peter