Question: RTF is a standard, true or false?

If 90 per cent (or whatever very high number the figure actually is) of the globe’s computer users are on Windows machines, then that possibly means 90 per cent of us are unaware that the Rich Text Format, or RTF, as used largely in Word documents, is in fact a Microsoft development.

Using Linux exclusively at home I’ve become really interested in (and frustrated by) standards for exchanging information other than HTML. The Webstock committee are constantly sending various documents around and trying various formats (we have three Mac users, two Windows users and moi on Linux).

We use various tools (including Word docs, Excel spreadsheets, Basecamp, Google docs, and so on), but there isn’t a decent non-proprietary way to share data. We are using RTF more and more as it’s light weight and it works for our documents. We’ll continue to use it, but I was amazed to discover that Microsoft can change RTF whenever they like.

While using RTF to share information cross platform (that is, a variety of computer operating systems, Windows is but one) doesn’t seem to pose too many problems at the moment, the question that arises is what happens should Microsoft decide at some future point to make changes to the format?

Most of us (the Windows majority) probably wouldn’t notice, but what about those using other operating systems?