On Friday 03 May 2002 12:47, John S. Gage wrote: > IE is a de facto standard.
I don't agree. There are a lot of copies around, and absolutely no garantee that there will not be a significant change in it tomorrow. Doesn't make a standard. Something over 99% of my medical notes currently consist of text. Apart from that there are a few photographs, and a drawing or two. SVG is a nice idea, but I see no need for it at present, and when I do I have confidence that there will be a viewer for SVG pictures whse source code is available, probably cross-platform. As a stopgap measure, I can see the point of defining a viewer for such file formats, and allowing the application to shell that viewer. In the specific case of a picture in SVG the viewer might be IE, however I do think that would not work very well on my Palm Pilot. There are adequate reasons for not using particular closed source applications as a required part of a medical record system, and they are distinct from the issue of standards compliance, and do not atually prevent the handling if individual adjuncts to records that require special formatting - DICOM and the like. I do think KISS is something to work for, and I don't see a real need to strain the envelope on these applications, better to concentrate on robustness and ubiquity, and, yes, on ideological purity. -- From one of the Linux desktops of Dr Adrian Midgley http://www.defoam.net/
