Standardizing on a proprietary application is asinine. Instead, it makes more sense to standardize on protocols and open interchange formats. Then, we can all use the right tools for the job, and share our information in ways that anyone, regardless of the type of computer they use, can benefit. The sheer number of typographical errors here seems to underscore my point. MacMillan, despite having an army of people trying to manually process everything and offset the deficiencies of braindead tools like Word , was unable to produce a book that went more than several pages without a typographical or production error.
Markup languages are incredibly important for the purpose of sharing information.
Markup languages seperate various levels of headings, body text, special symbols, etc., so that they can be viewed properly, without regard to the deployment environment. Another nice thing about markup languages is that they can easily be converted from one markup language to another, by using just a few lines of Perl or some other programming language. The world wide web would not have been the revolution that it was if it required a special application that was written by one organization. Nevertheless, a great number of people seem unable to learn a lesson from this fact. This is sad, and I hope a temporary situation.