Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton

Recent Items
 
OOX-ODF: The Danger of Finding Only What You're Looking For
 
Dear Microsoft: What Trumps Security as Job #1?
 
Opening Science
 
An Office-ODF Converter Regatta
 
Latest OOX-ODF FUD-Spat: States Prepare to Ban Zip and PDF Files
 
Raymond Chen: Celebrating the Old in the New
 
Awesome Breakthrough: Lousy Estimates
 
Don Ferguson: Near Death Experience
 
What's Not To Love About Seattle?
 
2007-01-18 Seattle Geek Dinner Cancellation

How Publicly-Owned Document Standards Matter

Thanks to Bob Sutor’s morning link post, I was led to Shane Schick’s valuable Globe and Mail column, “Will today’s text files be tomorrow’s stone tablets?”  This is a very handy 30,000-foot account of current activities with regard to obtaining some sort of ISO imprimatur for document-format specifications.  Some details are a little off (e.g., companies don’t submit specifications directly to ISO), but I don’t see anything that seriously detracts from this worthy overview. 

My title is a little off too, since having document-format specifications promulgated by various standards-ratifying bodies is about as directly public as the U.S. Electoral College system.  But it’s what we have (that is, ISO and the various nation-representing bodies).  It is always good to ask “who owns my documents” and “who owns my ability to access and preserve my documents,” and also “who owns the format I am counting on for stability and continued usability,” whether they are in the custody of Google or of some application (let’s say Mind Manager for variety) on your desktop computer.

posted by orcmid at 2/11/2007 10:36:22 AM