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Comment by benj111 | Hacker News Reader

I don't particularly see the problem with Libre office. But then they talk about collaboration and we've had that in the form of wikis for over 20 years, so I struggle to think what else this, as yet undefined, new thing needs to do.

I'm kind of surprised they're thinking in terms of software rather than file formats though. Software choice is a good thing. Lock in to a file format, even if technically open, isn't a good thing.

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"they're thinking in terms of software rather than file formats" where do you get that from? It's a longer article because it's a complex topic, but we explain in detail how the format it the core issue, and conclude that plain text (especially compared to the now common irrational .docx) would in fact be the preferable, future proof format.

Yes plain text is mentioned in the last paragraph, but the article isn't about that. I'm sure you could set up word to just output plain text, you can set up excel to deal with CSV. That would not be congruent with the entire rest of the article.

And plain text is not plain. You do a presentation with plain text. You aren't using those hyphens as hyphens anymore. So how does that impact those with screen readers? I mentioned CSV, that is still a format, it still has to be defined, you still have to decide how to embed a comma in it.

We are talking about the governments of a continent. You have to have documents that are accessible to everyone. You have to have documents that are secure, you have to have documents that cannot be modified. Reducing that to plain text, is like saying unicode is easy because they're just characters.

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