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[school-discuss] Foundational suggestions for CAST's standard document formats



Start with the OpenOffice.org document formats. They are already in XML, are 
widely used, are being adopted by the EU as their standard document 
interchange format (see http://www.1dok.org/), and involve no patents or 
other dangerous potential restrictions to their use or distribution.

Beyond this, OpenOffice.org programs are distributed under GNU's General 
Public Licence and are fiscally free, which means they and the source code 
which goes into them are available to anyone; even Microsoft is at liberty to 
make GPLed import/export plugins for their MS-Office suite without licencing 
cost and without endangering the IP in the office suite proper.

Adobe should also find this encouraging since OpenOffice.org is a favourite of 
Unix-based systems, and these will produce PDFs through KDE, the CUPS 
printing system, other spoolers courtesy of PS2PDF, or even for Windows 
machines via either CUPS or a Samba-based (print or file input) PDF maker. 
Increasing the availability of PDFs as a document fixing system should 
enormously increase the demand for Adobe's PDF-related software, and carrying 
across the tagging system used in the OpenOffice.org documents into PDF will 
again boost the utility of PDFs.

I am not visually or physically impaired to any noticeable degree, but based 
on my programming background I imagine that the use of XML realised in an 
existing, widespread and freely available standard would greatly assist the 
rapid development and widespread, transparent application of related 
accessibility tools.

I would welcome criticism of and improvement to this suggestion.

Cheers; Leon

-- 
http://www.cyberknights.com.au/  Modern tools, traditional dedication
http://slpwa.linux.org.au/       Member, Linux Professionals West Aus
http://conf.linux.org.au/        THE Australian Linux Technical Conf:
                                 22-25 January 2003, Perth: be there!