Re: [Bug-gnupedia]M$ Word and GIFs

[Hector Facundo Arena]

On Sun, 28 Jan 2001, [iso-8859-1] Tom Chance wrote:

> I think we need to sort out at what point we forgo FSF
> and GNU's philosophies for the sake of accessibility.
> Hector...?

Well, as everybody knows, there are some legal issues with the GIF format.
So I think the better for everyone is not to use it. After all, JPG is
most used that GIF.

> When it comes to images, I think the PNG support is
> fine. Opera and IE seem to handle them perfectly well,
> though I don't know aout Netscape, Mozilla etc. We
> should really use PNGs because although its not an
> exclusive policy of GNU, it is one that the whole
> community shares. We will also have to allow people to
> submit images of all sorts of formats, including GIFs,
> because many programs don't support saving images as
> PNGs. But we should ask people to save as PNGs,
> afterall its just an option in the "Save As" (or
> similar) menu!

Yes, Netscape, Mozilla and the others support PNG's very well. I use them
on my home site.

> With Word files, we should ask people to again go to
> Save As and save them as pure text. Its not that much
> bother to do that with a few files really is it?
> Because they'll have to sort out the formatting of
> their text anyway to remove things that we won't
> display like macros etc. If a University Professor is
> that unmotivated that he won't resave them, why is he
> bothering in the first place? We're assuming a high
> level of stupidity and/or laziness here! And people
> are hardly likely to submit a batch of 40 articles,
> whichthey'll have to redo individually. It would also
> be helpful to distribute a gzip or tarball type
> program. But to start with, we shouldn't allow Word
> files (as it is the GNU philosophy) and only allow
> them if it transpires later on that we really do need
> to.
>

Or they can just copy and paste to the web form if the article is just
text.