Second, your assumption that other SDOs have been able
to blissfully make use
of private formats like MS Word without incident is
simply untrue. One obvious
counterexample I know of is the CCITT/ITU, which
has in the past used MS Word
as a distribution format for many of it's
documents. I have quite a few of
these documents on hand and occasionally
need to refer to old versions of them,
but when I try and read them using
modern tools the results are rarely good.
Many of these documents simply
refuse to open, sometimes crashing the tool I'm
using, while others do open
but are misformatted, sometimes to the point of
being
illegible.
[YJS] I think that something has been lost in the
translation here.
ITU (I have participated in the ITU-T for many years,
and ALWAYS
sent in my contributions in Word) ONLY accepts
contributions in Word
and ONLY works on documents in Word (using ITU
designed templates).
The OUTPUT documents are available in Word and PDF,
with PDF
the recommended format (due to Word's bad habit of changing
pagination
when using different page sizes, etc). The PDF output
should be readable
indefinitely.
The Word format is mainly there for people who may
need to work on
updates of the standard (unlike RFCs, ITU
Recommendations are updated).
If such a Word doc is unreadable for anyone needing
it, the
secretariat has tools to convert it.
Y(J)S
