Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
Minor incompatibilities happen everywhere. GCC has minor incompatibilities with ANSI standard, Mozilla, MSIE and Konqueror with HTML etc.
So I wouldn't call any browser-specific HTML transparent, either. Same for compiler-specific C code (if it would be released under FDL; GPL doesn't talk of transparent and opaque formats).
- There is some patent owned by Microsoft regarding Office. I
think some description could be valable for Word format description. (did you remember the silly trick of Microsoft regarding the CIFS license ?) So we could have a restruction of using the description.
So far they haven't sued creators of any proprietary or Open Source program that uses .doc so even if it's true it's not for the format.
That fact that they haven't done so doesn't mean they couldn't in the future. I don't know if they have a patent that restricts independent implementations of the format, but if so, then the format is surely not transparent.
- The format is not described anywhere from a standard
place/organization (please provide an url, if you can found one).
I'm not WYSYWIG guy, why should I know such things.
Well, since you claimed: "IIRC .doc specification is available somewhere.", you might want to back up that claim ...
On Tue, Jul 16, 2002 at 02:35:06PM +0200, Joerg Schilling wrote:
There is no "Microsoft Word format", here is a bunch of different formats. Some of them are more or less decoded by free software.
The same can be said about HTML.
HTML standards are available from W3C, so there's nothing to be "decoded". Not so for nonstandard extensions of some browsers (see above).
Frank