Please send emails in the following format:

• Plain Text is strongly preferred. Preferably something that reads well in pine. 80 columns per line.
• HTML formatted email sometimes cause problems, so please avoid it, unless you are sure it is correctly formatted.
• PDF is strongly preferred if you have to send a formatted document.
• No Ms. Word attachments please, unless OpenOffice can handle it correctly. Especially No OfficeXP files.

Why not Ms. Word? (or other Ms. Office file formats, for that matter, including PPT, XLS, etc) I'll give you a few reasons.

1. Ms. Word (.doc) is not an open standard
2. Ms. Word files can transmit a lot of your private information without telling you.
3. You effectively impose a "file format tax" on your recipient.
4. Microsoft keeps changing the .doc format to force you to upgrade for the privilege of not being annoyed by their incompatibility.

1. Ms. Word (.doc) is not an open standard.

Please read the Peruvian Congressman Dr. Edgar David Villanueva Nunez's open letter to Ms, if you haven't seen it.

The state of Massachusetts is also planning to ditch Microsoft software and switch to open source software, for precisely the same reason that it uses closed, proprietary file formats.

As long as the knowledge is encoded in electronic form in this format, Microsoft will get to control the only way to access the knowledge. Even people have tried to reverse engineer this format, they have not been successful 100% of the time. It is not clear if future versions of Ms. Office products will be able to properly decode their own format. Therefore, there is a high risk that your knowledge could be locked away or even altered by future versions of Microsoft software.

In fact, Microsoft software may be able to rewrite your documents by replacing words, letters, punctuations, and even any sentences that it considers unfit. Microsoft has the ability to rewrite history as long as it has exclusive control over the file format. This is wrong.

2. Ms. Word files can transmit a lot of your private information without telling you.

Hundreds of reports have been written on this, and you might want to check out a recent article on bugging Word97 documents.

3. It is selfish:

I am urging people to be considerate when your choice of file format imposes on other people. If Ms. Office works for you as an authoring tool, please by all means continue to use it, but please do not force me to use it just to read your document.

4. Microsoft keeps changing the .doc format to force you to upgrade

In Office XP Microsoft intentionally introduces minor incompatibilities to make it annoying for users not to upgrade. Documents are readable by older versions but spacing is wrong, or some features don't show up completely right. Eventually you get tired of this annoyance and end up paying Microsoft for unnecessary "upgrades." See X. Robert Cringely's "The Once And Future King" column (PBS) 4/8/04, 4th paragraph from the bottom.

Imagine this: you have a friend who wants to share his/her digital photos with you. But, your friend saved all the photos using a Microsoft-compliant digital camera, which saves all photos in Microsoft's proprietary image format. You try to open the file, but it requires you to buy a copy of Microsoft Photo for $200. You say, "that's ridiculous! why must I pay $200 just to see some stupid photos!?" But the next thing you know, even your grandma started sending you photos in Ms. Photo format. Eventually, you gave up fighting and went out to buy a copy of Ms. Photo Viewer. However, every time you run it, it sends a random file on your hard disk to Microsoft. Furthermore, you found out that your friend's Ms. Photo files contain a copy of his social security number, bank account number, ...

Sounds ridiculous? Just substitute Microsoft Photo above with your favorite Office program, and you'll see how wrong this whole picture is. Something as fundamental as simple words and numbers should not be encoded in a format that only Microsoft's software can decode and manipulate. You are guilty of helping Microsoft collect this "file-format tax" every time you send somebody a file in a Microsoft-proprietary format. Microsoft has already hijacked the Internet with its web authoring tools that produce IE-only web pages, for exactly this reason.

Don't think it will happen? If you have been shopping for a CD recently, some record companies are starting to sell these music CDs that can be played on Windows with Windows Media Player ONLY. They are not compatible with regular CD players, Macintosh, or Linux. Microsoft intends to control all media this way (that's why they name the program Media Player, not just CD player). By DMCA together with record companies and other content providers, Microsoft will incriminate you if you attempt to decode their format. Pretty soon, us researchers can go to jail just for writing a few lines of perl script. Don't let this happen!

Just say no to closed, proprietary file formats.

But Wait -- Microsoft has been embracing XML recently. Isn't that an open format?

XML itself is open in terms of syntax, but that doesn't stop Microsoft from embedding proprietary data tags whose semantics is understandable only to Microsoft. So, the compatibility will be a one-way street: 3rd-party software may be able to generate documents for Microsoft Office programs to read, but documents saved by Microsoft Office programs will not always be readable by 3rd-party programs. As long as the interoperability is less than 100%, people will continue to be locked in by their proprietary format. Thus, this embracing of XML is a good marketing trick to answer all the criticisms about their closed file format.

PS. I spell it "Ms." instead of "MS" because the company currently spells its name "Microsoft," with a lower case "s". It no longer uses the geeky capitalization "MicroSoft" that it used back in the 70's and early 80's.