Re: Good news - UK government officially adopts ODF

On 24 July 2014 06:51, Chris Bannister <[email protected]> wrote:

> On Wed, Jul 23, 2014 at 11:46:08PM +1200, Rob Pearson wrote:
> > Some good news,  back in February there were hundreds of submissions
> > supporting ODF to be adopted as the UK Government standard for editable
> > documents.   If you submitted, well done, as this was successful.
> https://www.gov.uk/government/news/open-document-formats-selected-to-meet-user-needs
> >
> > This isn't to be confused with open source software,  'Open Standards'
> also
> > enable proprietary software vendors to flourish, plus allows all other
> > businesses to break out of the stifling vendor lock-in environments
> > currently creamed by Microsoft and their cross-licensed colluder Apple.
> >
> > Now if our NZ government could change its recommendation from Microsoft's
> > 'proprietary' OOXML file format to the Open Document Format.   And while
> at
> > it,  change things so that our government websites are mandated to be
> tested
> > on a minimum of a cross platform(vendor) web browser,  currently most are
> > only coded/tested for Microsoft Internet Explorer and/or Microsoft
> Windows
> > operating systems, surprisingly this includes websites mandated to
> support
> > 'web standards' today.
>
> In total agreement! and while we're at it get businesses to stop
> emailing in HTML.
>
> Wasn't there something in the last few years about reducing the
> Government's reliance on Microsoft ... ahh ...
>
>
> http://podcast.radionz.co.nz/ntn/ntn-20090527-0908-Government_reliance_on_Microsoft.ogg
>
> Wouldn't the next step be targetting the education curriculum, e.g.
> teach email as a text based medium on an OS independant platform, rather
> than "You wanna learn email"? then opening Outlook and explaining the
> features.
>
> Instead of teaching document preparation by immediately opening a word
> processor, and then pointing out all the features, it should be taught
> in an OS independant, program independant way.
>
> Unfortunately, I think the educators are influenced by the business
> community - e.g. teach Word skills, Dreamweaver skills, etc. :(
>
>
> Job advts where computer use is part of the job state that applicants need
to be conversant with - and then name specific software instead of saying
word processing or spreadsheets etc.

Kathinka.

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