> Brian,
>
> What I do not get is how can you plug a product from a company that for
> as long as it has realised the existence of the web it has tried to
> make it proprietary (MSN, Netscape, Office2000 coming).
>
> Will the W3C soon recommend that we must all use Internet Explorer as
> the only browser so we get all the "weird and beutifull" proprietary
> html stuff that Office2000 will generate.  Unless off course Microsoft is
> now an Open Systems company as with Java etc.
>
> An example of open standards from Essex (appropriate as it is the site
> on which the Ariadne article is based) is that the engine indexes
> *.doc and *.ppt (probably *.xls too). Am I supposed to be able to see
> these files and, must I have Office2, Office97 ... Office2005?
> (I know, my problem and Essex's if I cannot view them).
>
> I rest my case.
>
> Regards
> Charles

Hi Charles
   Thanks for the comments.
    I mentioned the Ariadne article as I thought it was well-written, and
appropriate to the initial question, especially for institutions which run
NT web servers (and within our community we're likely to see increasing
numbers of them if FE colleges join JISC in the summer).    My role is to
inform a range of communities (primarily UK HE, but shortly FE as well, and
I also have links with the public library community) of issues related to
the web.  Parts of the community have a open source, Unix culture, others
are more interested in shrink wrapped solutions.  Note the preferences don't
necessarily reflect normal expectations (Unix in large, old Universities, NT
in smaller institutions and libraries) - see for example the article on the
demise of Unix systems in the article at
http://www.leeds.ac.uk/ucs/news/newsletter/news233/future.html
    The whole issue of proprietary systems / open source / resourcing for IT
/ software costs is, of course, a complex one.  In terms of browser support
for standards, IE 5 comes off best of the free browsers (although its XML
and CSS support is buggy).  Since it started Netscape has pushed proprietary
solutions.  Netscape 5 *may* provide a more standard solution (going by the
Mozilla website) although since Netscape were taken over by AOL and sacked
10% (?) of Netscape's staff, it's not clear if the Mozilla codebase will
make it to the market (remember when Apple's Cyberdog and HotSauce
technologies were going to take over the world - until Apple closed down
these groups and also sacked a lot of their staff.)

   Brian

PS  Not sure what you mean when you criticise a tool for indexing
proprietary file formats (whether it's MS, Lotus, Borland, etc).  I suspect
this is a very useful feature for indexing tools - and should be on a
feature list for any indexing tool for indexing large web sites.



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