Re: and... text for the win

[Christian Huitema <[e-mail]>]

On 11/6/2020 9:55 PM, Carsten Bormann wrote:
> On 2020-11-07, at 03:36, John Levine <[e-mail]> wrote:
>> In the other 99% of the world everyone exchanges MS Word documents.  I'm
>> certainly not saying that's wonderful, but it's reality.
> Hammer/nail.
>
> 99 % of the world is not collaboratively developing high-quality technical specifications, so I don’t care that much about those 99 % as a role model.

A lot of the rest of the world is working collaboratively, including
using commercial products like Microsoft's Office 365 to develop reports
and other documents. Or rival products from other companies. Whether
they are on par with our "high quality specifications" is debatable, but
I have no doubt that at least some are. I am definitely not proposing
that we immediately switch to using commercial products, but you cannot
just dismiss the experience of all these users.

>
> I expect the minutes from the apartment owners’ meeting to be in MS-Word.
> Or a random document from our university administration (which is slowly learning not to send around MS-Word documents as a replacement for emails :-).
Sure. Sending iterative versions of large documents by e-mail is not
exactly recommended practice. State of the art communication uses cloud
services from that. Kind of the whole reason why Microsoft developed
servers like SharePoint, or services like Office365. And of course
Microsoft is not alone there, Google has services like that too, and
quite a few other companies. Again, I am not advocating moving to such
services. Just mentioning that they do in fact exist
> But technical documents in the computer science department?  Ha.
> Gitlab, hackmd/codimd, and (in the math/theoretical computer science world) overleaf are our collaboration platforms.
>
> (My information security class uses markdown for all its assignments.
> Even though that is not identified as a learning objective of that class, it creates great satisfaction to talk to alumni a couple of years later and hear unsolicited testimonials how they have weaned themselves off the time-wasting use of other formats.)

It may very well be that ad hoc tools developed for our community end up
better for us than generic tools developed by commercial companies. But
you should not take that for granted. After all, the commercial success
of these companies depends on keeping customers happy, and collaboration
on documents, spreadsheets or other items is their bread-and-butter.

-- Christian Huitema