[Usability] Default document formats

[Vidar Braut Haarr <vhaarr+usability gmail com>]

My parents called me the other day and told me that their friends were
unable to read any documents they send.

I thought "well, they probably use Windows and MS Word", and of
course, they did. So I instructed them as to how they should change
the default save format in OOo2 and Abiword to MS Office 97, and now
they're all happy.

What's with this anyway? Defaulting to saving in some format that
noone knows how to read? It's like .. you're living in Sweden but you
speak Spanish to all your friends (who don't understand Spanish at
all).

I realize that MS formats are not open and free, but frankly I don't
care. The only thing I care about is that the people that recieve my
documents can read them.

So I say: Make OOo and Abiword default to either saving in RTF (which
would be sufficient for most documents - if the document contains
things that RTF do not understand, it could just auto-switch the
document type to something silly, like OpenDocument) or MS Office 97
format.

I filed a bug about this in the Ubuntu bugzilla today, but it was
instantly resolved as WONTFIX, which I understand, but disagree with.

--
Vidar Braut Haarr
"Programmers don't die, they
just GOSUB without RETURN."