[OT] documents for the general public need to be generally readable

[Wade Smart]

20081029 0948 GMT-6

This is a small rant of mine.

My son is in orchestra and his teacher sent out a file in a Microsoft 
docx format to ALL of the students in the music department. What upsets 
me about this is, first, to assume that all parents are using the latest 
Microsoft Office much less Microsoft Windows is ignorant. A great many 
of the music students use Mac and therefore may or may not use Office. 
And this says nothing of all of us who use something else. Second, if it 
is for the students of a public school system then it needs to be 
something that is generic enough to be opened by someone with any type 
of system.

Anyway, I wont go on but - this is the reason I push using standard 
formats readable by many applications - but also why I put Ubuntu on so 
many systems. You have everything you need in (almost) every format that 
you need someone else to see.

Wade