There's been a lot of fuss about office document formats this week; its been interesting to watch. On one side, you have the group that believe that OOXML is conspiracy by Microsoft to achieve eternal lock in on their tools. Then there is the Microsoft camp, that view ODF as a tactic by IBM to make lots of money selling Lotus to governments, and IBMs tactics in blocking the counter move, the fasttrack standardisation of OOXML as wrong. Maybe, just maybe, both are right.

There is only one true ISO document format, ISO 216, known colloquially as A4 paper. This has the following features. It's well designed by mathematicians/engineers to scale well. Its dimensions defined in millimetres. It is an elegant size. And it is broadly used apart from that corner of the world where GSM phones don't work reliably.

The other format, US letter, is both ugly and hard to work with. It should be deprecated forthwith. In particular, when you ask google documents to create a PDF -this being the easiest way to produce documents that print nicely- it should offer some means of creating A4 pages, if not actually defaulting to it for EU users. But no, hit the PDF button on Google docs and up comes US letter page that doesnt print properly. This is why multiple competing standards suck. SI measurement and A4 paper make sense -let's adopt them.

As for ODF versus OOXML, well, that's a minor detail compared to important things like how you measure distance or what shape paper should be in the physical world. They are both just file formats, after all.