P.S. I ask my fellow bibliophiles to mourn the burning of the Mayan bark books (http://www.mayacodices.org/) in 1562. This and the destruction of the Library of Alexandria make me wish for some sort of time machine / viewer so that we can recover what has been lost.

The reason is that speech is not a designed artefact, but part of our biology. Language and speech are as much part of being human as walking on two legs.

What gets standardized is a national ORTHOGRAPHY. Writing IS a designed artefact and has to be standardized to allow communication.

This difference is clearly visible from the fact that in English, the relation between orthography and speech is little better than in Chinese. But in many languages, there is a good correspondence between these two, eg, Spanish and Italian.

The differences between the variants of English (and Chinese) are covered up by the orthography, where most incomprehensible variants are found in the UK.

So, US, UK, and Ausie writings present no problems, but try to understand rural Scottisch SPOKEN English (one of the oldest variants).

Winter

On top of that there was the factor of separate linguistic evolution enforced by geographic isolation.

The English language has picked up words from the many cultures it has been in contact with over the centuries: French, Norse, Spanish, scientific terms from Greek and Latin, Arabic, Indian, Celtic, etc. This has made English richer, but has not turned it into something un-English.

The average high school graduate can read Shakespeare with little difficulty, Chaucer with some help, and Beowulf with a semester of Anglo Saxon. This is pretty good stability, although I know there are examples of isolated languages which have been even more stable over time, such as Icelandic.

Maybe the US/UK divide is silly, but consider this: lots of us speak differently for a reason. American bureaucrats do not talk like British bureaucrats because they have to. The Justice Department is not the same as the Home Office. And attorneys/lawyers are not the same as barristers/solicitors.

Even if we were to have a world tongue, there would still be all sorts of parlances and jargons. They all have different uses.

Just like file formats.

This is yet another issue where one standard should be “choosen”, because multiple versions of English help no one.

I’d like to see Microsoft explain why US English and UK English (along with all the other variants) are good for the consumer.

To go back to A measures. The metrical system was forced upon continental Europe by Napoleon. We were all the better for it. Time zones were forced upon us by the railroads.

Doc was forced upon us by Microsoft. Even as an MS Office user, I hated the format because it has made me lose data and work. Still I had to use the application so there was no choice.

I want to be able to buy lightbulbs without having to worry over fitting them into my lamp-shades. Just as I have always hated proprietary vacuum cleaner bags, which were expensive and I kept getting the wrong ones (I finally bought a Dyson).

Winter

Actually, they were :-)

The A measures were standardized to fit the metric system.

After the meter was standardized over continental Europe, all machinery and tools were created in easy to measure dimensions.

Like the old buildings of the classical ages, which all had dimensions in whole local feet/thumbs etc. sizes.

The A0 basic size was determined by the standard square meter. Paper weight and costs are by the square meter too.

Therefore, having basic sheet sizes in integral numbers per square meter simplifies acounting tremendously.

There are 16 A4 in a square meter. So there are 32 square meters in 512 sheets. Standard packages are 500 sheet (I didn’t count them, this could be rounded). So the weights and costs are easy to calculate.

Making them 2% larger/smaller makes acounting really difficult.

Rob

When multiple corporations select different standards on data they need to share, interoperability becomes a problem. This is especially true with documents because they are meant to be exchanged in the first place.

This article illustrates magnificently the significance of time. A standard that has trouble to last as lettle as a decade before it gets superseded is a major problem. Microsoft Office formats are deprecated every few years. OOXML comes with an expectation that billions of existing documents are mass converted for compatibility. Will we see a repeat at every new version of Office because Microsoft changes some details in the proprietary aspects of Office? You can’t manage historical records that way.

When I see Microsoft promoting choice, I expect this to fall on deaf ears. Diversity is the worst choice of all and everybody including Microsoft knows it. Otherwise we wouldn’t use TCP/IP. We would all stick with SNA, DECnet, XNS, IPX, Appletalk and the likes. We had plenty of choice back then.

It is interesting that in 500 years, until now, no commercial interest has ever dared to carve this vast interoperable document landscape into a private proprietary fiefdom. Sure, we had intentionally closed formats even in the days of ink on paper. We had our secret codes and Enigma machines and such. But this was the realm of espionage not of business collaboration.

But of course, in addition to the format issue, there are collection, physical media preservation, funding, privacy and other concerns about long term digital document archiving. The National Archives of Australia, in particular has written a lot on this subject. An open document format, enables, but alone is not sufficient for long-term availability of digital records. A lot of other pieces need to come together first.

To The Wraith’s comment about choice, we should remember that in the paper world, ISO (and ANSI and others) standards played a large part in standardizing paper sizes, necessary for efficient filing and retrieval of documents. As a variety-reducing standard, the standard paper sizes lead to economies of scale around envelopes, filing folders, filing cabinets, printer paper trays, shredders, etc.

No one ever claimed that the exact dimensions of A4 paper were magically superior to paper that was 2% larger or 2% smaller. No one ever complained that standardizing on that paper size would eliminate user choice, and cause innovation to suffer. But as a variety-reducing standard it was good to adopt it and optimize the market in paper-related technologies around a single family of paper sizes.

I took a course on the history of physics from Gerald Holton years ago. One thing I learned there was the importance of getting access to the scientist’s lab notebooks. The published papers are too clean, they make things look too predictable, too obvious. You get a much better sense of how the discovery was really made when you read the notebooks and interpret every number and every symbol.

This applies to literary works as well. When the typewritten manuscript draft of T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” was discovered in 1968 we finally saw the handwritten notes, corrections and suggestions from his friend Ezra Pound, and realized how important that collaboration was to the work.

The same thing applies to business collaboration. It would be impossible for us to accomplish our work in the OASIS ODF TC without having a single interoperable format to work with, one rich enough to handle the formatting of the ODF specification, as well as rich enough to handle the change tracking, revision tracking and associated features needed for document collaboration.

It wasn’t just a question of who asked ISO to standardize it’s format first !!

Also at the moment you already have different formats like .doc and .pdf . how can this be explained in your single format theory ?

So I guess the question is, when you want to save something/anything, what will you reach for? I’ll take mine with ODF because I know how it is composed, who controls it, and that it will always have a freeware implementation of itself. At least that a lightyear ahead of that other spec.