Explaining Open Standards email attachements

[Sam Liddicott]

On Mon, 2010-04-05 at 12:48 +0100, Hugo Roy wrote:

> Dear Sam,
> 
> I don't see your point in discussing the text… 



My point as I first mentioned is that I cannot tell if your text is a
political document or a guide to interoperability. My point is that it
can't be both.
I'm trying to improve the text as you invited.



> can you tell me where in
> this text you see an unhelpful, inconvenient, geeky-stupid text?


No, because it is not sufficient for anyone non-technical to act upon.
It will have to be accompanied by a technical explanation which will be
perceived as geeky, and as I explained, also unhelpful, inconvenient and
stupid. For instance:

"When you attach a file to an email, please make sure that your
correspondent will be able to read your files correctly. It is a basic
principle of courtesy. And there is an easy way to make this possible:
use open standards."

As I showed, with mp3 the correspondent likely will be able to read the
file correctly unless they have taken an active and informed decision to
not be able to. With an open standard that you mention - ogg - this is
not true at all.

With ogg, your statement "If you do so, your correspondent will have the
possibility to choose which program he or she wants" actually becomes
"your correspondent will probably be required to choose a different
program to the one they usually use" - as you showed when stating
recently that the correspondent may have to install VLC or Firefox.


> 
> The point of this text is to give an easy explanation of why open
> standards are important, taking the example of emails. In doing so, it
> also tries to raise awareness on some Open Standards such as ODF and
> OGG.


Then it is a political document and not an instructional one. Is the
audience intended to be those who are already aware of the issue and
just need to have useful information gathered in once place, or is it
intended to convert and/or raise awareness among those who aren't aware
of the issues?


> 
> All the rest is up to you and the others, to refuse or accept mp3 files
> or not. I don't care and I do not want to discuss in the text to reject
> mp3 files because they're not Open Standards: I understand it is about
> convenience, but I want to say that convenience comes on both sides.
> That's all.



For sure, I don't think that such a discussion it belongs in the text,
but it is one of the questions the text raises; it is an implicit
self-contradiction in the text - that widespread standards aid
interoperability, not open standards Open-ness is just a partial driver
for wide-spreadness, not a substitute.

Sam
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.fsfe.org/pipermail/discussion/attachments/20100405/eaccac73/attachment.html>