Explaining Open Standards email attachements

[Michel Roche]

Le 02/04/2010 05:51, Theo Schmidt a écrit :
> With DOCX I'm uncertain what do do now that OpenOffice can open these files.
> When somebody sends me one I somtimes pretend I still can't open it and ask for
> a PDF, RTF or even (Horror!) DOC. I generally explain that DOCX is a bad idea
> because the majority of people can't open it, i.e. everybody who hasn't got an
> up-to-date program or plugin. I expect this actually includes more Windows-users
> than Linux-users.

The point in docX is that actually OpenOffice (>3.x) users can perfectly 
handle them (at least for quite simple documents that represent, say, 
99% of the production) whereas users of somewhat old versons of MS 
Office cannot read them.

At this peculiar time, it's a very good help making users migrate or at 
least install OpenOffice :-)

So despite the fact tha docX *is a bad idea*, it's inherent lack of 
backward compatibility helps a lot Free Software in some cases :-)))

Michel Roche