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Mailing lists / fpc-other / 2007-10

Standards Rule Standards Suck

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L
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I think it is better to send a RTF document than a ODT document: * it is smaller * more programs can read it * no need to download and install plug-ins for a seizable minority of people without open office or ODT-plug-in installed. > > Then why have a standard, if no-one is going to use it ?

You kind of answered your own question. GNU Pascal comes to mind. Standards generally create overly standard standards, that people have trouble using: since they are so standardized and standard. It's a problem with general purpose formats and languages that try to be perfectly standards compliant. However, I think making RTF standard and making modern borland pascal dialect standard could help with PR and marketing, even if no one paid attention to the standard. Example, very few people pay attention to strict html standards and very few people pay attention to C99 standards. I don't even think MS VC is C99 compliant.

But everyone thinks these standards are extremely important, so having an RTF standard and modern borland pascal standard would definitely help. Plus, for those who do wish to comply to standards, it really helps.. i.e. a company that would not use a language unless it has a standard may avoid using freepascal and delphi products. Plus, standards do give a point of reference.. i.e. maybe MSVC is 60 percent standards compliant or 80 percent.. whereas borland pascal we have no reference at all.

Jonas Maebe
to L
>> Then why have a standard, if no-one is going to use it ? You kind of answered your own question. GNU Pascal comes to mind.

That's a quite different situation. ODF is a pretty new standard (both as far as implementation and as far as "official status" is concerned), RTF is an pretty established implementation standard (which is displayed and interpreted differently in almost every application that supports it, because there are lots of application- specific extensions to it).

The official ODF standard is based on the OpenOffice implementation, it's not some abstract specification dreamed up by formalists. And e.g. the "WordPad" of the next Mac OS X version (TextEdit) will have native support for it (and also for OOXML, for that matter) -- currently it only supports RTF and DOC.

Jonas

Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho
to Jonas Maebe
Jonas Maebe wrote
RTF is an pretty established implementation standard

Actually RTF is not a standard. It has a well documented reference, but isn't a standard. Microsoft can do any changes it desires with it alone.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Text_Format

Which has an interresting point that being a standart and being widely adopted are two different things. Java isn't standarized either, Sun reserves the right to do any changes it desires with it, but it is nevertheless widely adopted.

Extended pascal is standarized, but isn't widely adopted.

Sun does voluntarely participade on the Java Community Process, which is a lot more then Borland ever did with it's Delphi language.

Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho
Jonas Maebe
to Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho
Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho wrote
On 10/19/07, Jonas Maebe wrote: > RTF is an pretty established implementation standard Actually RTF is not a standard.

That's why I called it an implementation standard (in the same way that Delphi-style Object Pascal is an implementation standard).

Jonas