Marbux's Profile

Member since July 6, 2006

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    Marbux

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  1. Comment - Microsoft Will Support ODF If It Doesn't 'Restrict Choice Among Formats'

    (Jun 19, 2007 - 3:16 PM)

    Asellus sez: "I will not say OOXML is easy to implement, but saying ODF is easier to implement just by looking at the ISO specification is a fallacy."

    I shouldn't respond to trolls, but I will this time. Asellus is simply wrong. Large hunks of Ecma 376 are simply undocumented. And what's more, absolutely no vendor has a featureful app that writes to that format. Not even Microsoft. There's a myth that Ecma 376 is the same as the Office Open XML used by Microsoft. It is not.

    I've spend a few hundred hours comparing the Ecma 376 specification (the version of OOXML being considered at ISO) to the information about the undocumented APIs used by MS Office 2007 that recently sprung loose in litigation. See http://www.groklaw.net/p...Rpt_Andrew_Schulman.pdf

    Each of those APIs *should* have corresponding metadata in the formats, but are not in the Ecma 376 specification. E.g., there is a single minor tag in Ecma 376 for Sharepoint Server, apparently left in by accident from Microsoft's own documentation. All of the other tags needed for interaction with Sharepoint Server are omitted.

    As to the supposed difficulty of implementing ODF in MS Office, you might consider what former Massachusetts Secretary of Administration & Finance Eric Kriss said: "… technical people at Microsoft told him it would be 'trivial' to add support for ODF to the new Office 2007. The resistance to doing so came from the vendor's business side, according to Kriss." http://www.computerworld...273815&pageNumber=2

    Asellus' point about Abiword using file conversion in its implementation of OpenDocument is just plain silly. Any legacy application will use conversion to implement new file formats, absent a complete rewrite of its page rendering engine. E.g., OpenOffice.org uses conversion to implement ODF; Microsoft Office uses conversions to implement MOOXML (and HTML, RTF, WPD, and several other file formats).

    As to the notion that competing standards are a Good Thing, that could only be said by someone who is either a fool or being dishonest. Ever got that "file type not supported" error message from your operating system? That is the only benefit of competing standards.

    None of this is to say that OpenDocument is perfect. Far from it. OpenDocument at present is crippled from an interoperability standpoint. I'm a member of the OASIS OpenDocument Technical Committee and I think the resistance of the big vendors to fixing the interoperability warts is simply outrageous, particularly because they are fairly trivial changes.

    But the advancement of software users' interests are not advanced by painting OOXML as other than deeply flawed. It is vendor-specific and far from "open." The lesser of the two evils is clearly OpenDocument, which is at least open even if not yet interoperable.

    The sooner folks can start discussing practical methods of convergence, the better. See e.g., http://ec.europa.eu/idabc/servlets/Doc?id=27956

    That set of slides summarizing a conference of some 20 European national governments' IT types says a lot more about the future of office document formats than Mr. Asellus has to offer.

  2. Comment - Microsoft to Support OpenDocument

    (Jul 6, 2006 - 12:04 PM)

    You have it wrong about Microsoft promising not to sue in regard to its Office XML format. The covenant not to sue that Microsoft issued applies only to the deprecated Office 2003 XML schemas. Moreover, even that covenant is severely clouded by licensing issues on other essential technology.

    You will find a fully referenced discussion in my article at http://www.groklaw.net/a...51129101457378#Contents