Digital Babel

[unixronin]

We're all packed and ready to head off to Maryland for Thanksgiving, and I'm sitting here waiting for my parents to email me a crucial form for our Medicaid recertification that was due YESTERDAY in a file format that we can actually use.  Why does every closed-source software vendor in the WORLD have to have their own friggin' proprietary file formats for common data like scanned images?  Come the hell ON, people, what's the point of having standards if NOBODY WILL FRELLING USE THEM?!?!?

Comments

[ilcylic.livejournal.com]

But standards are so much fun... That's why everybody makes up their own!

Some of it is reinventing the wheel. Sometimes the wheel that's being reinvented actually needs it. (.bmp, for example. It sure is a standard, but ye gods...) Most of the time it's for intentional noncompatability purposes.

Government agencies should be required to ascertain and utilise the most widely available, functional stanrdard available for anything. Preferably the most open standard, as well. (Fuck .gif!)

Plain text, compliant HTML, and .png would be a great set of tools for this sort of thing.

-Ogre

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Hasn't the Unisys patent expired now? Or is it first-few-months-of-2004 that it expires?
But yeah, PNG does a great job for pretty much anything you'd want to use either gif or JPEG for.
(Man, this HP keyboard SUCKS.)