why we have FITS

[Rob Seaman]

An article in the current issue of the Risks Digest struck me as a good
reminder of the fundamental justification for FITS, as well as a caution
that a portable standard requires portable documentation.

The article is appended below or can reached at the URL:

    http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/18.71.html#subj11

I'm also going to take this chance to put in a strong plug for the Risks
Digest.  Astronomy in general, and the ADASS community in particular,
are certainly not immune to computer risks.  The Risks Digest can be read
as the comp.risks newsgroup, as a mailing list, or from the general URL:

    http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks

The moderator of the Risks Forum is Peter G. Neumann, who also has a
cautionary book derived from discussions in Risks:

    "Computer Related Risks", Peter G. Neumann
    New York: ACM Press; Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1995.
    QA76.5 .N424 1995

Rob Seaman
--

RISKS-LIST: Risks-Forum Digest  Monday 23 December 1996  Volume 18 : Issue 71

   FORUM ON RISKS TO THE PUBLIC IN COMPUTERS AND RELATED SYSTEMS (comp.risks)
   ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy, Peter G. Neumann, moderator

[...]

Date: Sat, 21 Dec 1996 06:29:39 -0500 (EST)
From: "Darrin B. Jewell" <jewell at mit.edu>
Subject: Microsoft documents and Rosetta stones (Giersig, RISKS-18.70)

This past summer I was getting increasingly frustrated by users who were
sending me e-mail with Microsoft Word ".DOC" files attached to them via MIME
encodings.  I do not own a copy of Microsoft Word and did not want to
purchase one simply so that I could read documents people send to me.
Instead, I wanted the specification for Microsoft Word file format so that I
would have a Rosetta stone for the documents I wished to read.

I contacted Microsoft's customer support and was informed of the following:
 
 1. The specification for Microsoft Word file format is unpublished
    proprietary information.  However, I could download a free reader
    for Microsoft Word files which would run under one of Microsoft's
    operating systems.  Source code for the reader was not available.

 2. I could ask the sender of the message to send me the attachment encoded
    in Rich Text Format which is the official export format for Microsoft
    Word documents.  The specification for Rich Text Format was publically
    available from Microsoft.

Since I did not own a computer running one of Microsoft's operating systems,
I asked Microsoft for the specification for Rich Text Format files.  As a
computer programmer, this was also a more useful and interesting form of
Rosetta stone than a precompiled translating program.

I was then directed to the file GC0165.EXE on the Microsoft ftp site, which
I was able to download and unzip.  (Itself another decoding adventure.)
Included was the file GC0165.DOC, a Microsoft Word format file containing
the specification I desired.  The included README.TXT file contained the
following comment in plain ASCII:

  The GC0165.DOC file included in this compressed file is the Rich Text
  Format (RTF) Specification version 1.3.  The document is in Word 6.0 for
  Windows format. If you have neither Word 6.0 for Windows nor Word 2.0 for
  Windows with the 6.0-to-2.0 converter, you will need to call Microsoft
  Product Support Services at (206) 462-9673 to obtain a hard copy of the
  document.

At this point, I decided it was fastest to have my friend who owned
Microsoft Word print out the RTF specification for me.

Since this experience, I usually ask people who wish to send me Word
documents to send them in RTF format.  When I explain to people the RISKS
involved in using documents without open standards, I get comments about
being ridiculous and pedantic or perhaps a blink and a "So what?"  Even
though Microsoft Word supports an "official export format", it is clearly
not obvious to everyone why it should be used.

Darrin

	Reused without explicit authorization under blanket 
	permission granted for all Risks-Forum Digest materials.  
	The author(s), the RISKS moderator, and the ACM have no 
	connection with this reuse.

-- 
seaman at noao.edu, http://iraf.noao.edu/~seaman
NOAO, 950 N Cherry Ave, Tucson AZ 85719, 520-318-8248
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