[odf-discuss] Response to Andy Updegrove's article about the Foundation

[Ian Lynch]

On Thu, 2008-02-07 at 16:52 +0100, Daniel wrote:
> Rob Weir:
> >> What would be interesting is an examination of standards or
> >> technologies that you believe have provided "universal
> >> interoperability".
> 
> Ian Lynch:
> > I doubt there is any absolutely universal interoperability standard but
> > ASCII for text characters
> 
> And then, it's only good for English and Latin :-)
> Try writing Fuß, übrigens, schön or 日本語 using ASCII.

Yes that's why I said I doubt any standard is universal for all needs.
That means we need extensible standards, not parallel different
standards that try and do the same sort of thing even in subtly
different ways. It's always possible interoperability will break with
some unforeseen (obscure) demand in complex scenarios but again getting
90%, 95%, 99% then 99.9% then 99.999% of use cases working seems like a
reasonable practical strategy.

Ian
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