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How you can possibly compare the two on equal terms when one isn't available for you to look at?

Huh? The OOXML standard is available for all to see at Standard ECMA-376: Office Open XML File Formats

Now, arguments can be made that the standard is not defined well enough to be implemented (due to things like "do it like word95 did"), but that's the sort of thing that should be resolved by all interested parties before finalizing.

Well, apparently ECMA do other things:

http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Standard.htm

So... there is a standard, and there is a standard, and there...

Yeah, and a wiki is the authoritative end all-be all of information. See here http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/index.html

Heh. Thanks. I was actually having a little trouble wording that...

I don't know much about ECMA besides that they were responsible for the js standards... Looking at their list of standards, it appears they are responsible for a few more yuckies such as the CLI and the Windows C API. On the other hand, it appears they control the Eiffel standard as well.

I wonder what their reputation in other industries is like...

Heh. Thanks. I was actually having a little trouble wording that...

I don't know much about ECMA besides that they were responsible for the js standards... Looking at their list of standards, it appears they are responsible for a few more yuckies such as the CLI and the Windows C API. On the other hand, it appears they control the Eiffel standard as well.

I wonder what their reputation in other industries is like...

Heh. Thanks. I was actually having a little trouble wording that...

I don't know much about ECMA besides that they were responsible for the js standards... Looking at their list of standards, it appears they are responsible for a few more yuckies such as the CLI and the Windows C API. On the other hand, it appears they control the Eiffel standard as well.

I wonder what their reputation in other industries is like...

Heh. Thanks. I was actually having a little trouble wording that...

I don't know much about ECMA besides that they were responsible for the js standards... Looking at their list of standards, it appears they are responsible for a few more yuckies such as the CLI and the Windows C API. On the other hand, it appears they control the Eiffel standard as well.

I wonder what their reputation in other industries is like...

"ECMA International is a group that approves standards, but isn't as widely accepted as ISO."

Fixed that for you.

Lately, they've also been known for the large amount of Microsoft standards passing through them, such as C# and OOXML.

ECMA International is a group that writes standards.

http://www.ecma-international.org/memento/TC45-M.htm

Who's the fucking moron troll again, you mouthnoise-spilling faggot?

Please be specific. How, exactly, has he held their feet to the fire? Read this Ecma page, please, and please point out exactly what he has been responsible for changing for the better for anyone but Microsoft.

[citation needed]

The following organizations have participated in the work of Ecma TC45 and their contributions are gratefully acknowledged: Apple, Barclays Capital, BP, The British Library, Essilor, The Gnome Foundation, Intel, The Library of Congress, Microsoft, NextPage, Novell, Statoil, and Toshiba.

I can't imagine why the British Library and the Library of Congress support such a crappy standard, while there already is one which they could improve if they'd like (If you work at either and are reading this, please consider joining the OASIS office TC as well, home of the ISO ODF standard ;-) ).

As you can see for your self, GNOME is participating directly in the Standards process: http://www.ecma-international.org/memento/TC45-M.htm

According to the ISO/IEC press release, the decisive "Ballot Resolution Meeting" (BRM) next Februrary will be in Geneva, Switzerland, where e.g. Ecma is headquartered. How can Ecma be prevented from having a similarly corrupting influence on the "Ballot Resolution Meeting" as they had in the Swiss standardization organization SNV (SIUG appealed)?

Actually that particular form of corruption is not allowed by the rules (the comments have to be "technical reasons").

However there are other possible ways of corruption that are not disallowed by the rules. For example, in Switzerland, the relevant committee was chaired by H. R. Thomann, a consultant who earns money by representing business interests in standardization organizations. The rules of the Swiss standards organization did not require him to disclose whether he was getting paid by one of the interested companies. Thomann was appointed to this role by Sebestyen who besides his role in the Swiss dtandardization organization is also secretary-general of Ecma. For some more details about this conflict of interests, see SIUG's appeal.

Dude, stick with VC 6.0, or g++ then, because the 'managed c++/cli' looks not much like C++, and they are trying to ratify it as a standard.

But it's not wrong, unlike the "dates start at either 1900 or 1904 i forget which but at least 1900 is a leap year from now on" crap from OOXML (part 4, par. 3.17.4.1, p. 2522, if you don't believe me -- I almost fell of my chair when I read that paragraph).

I didn't entirely believe this, and anyone else who didn't should go here like I did: ECMA Standard Office Open XML Formats. Although the writing style is slightly less retarded than in fritsd's paraphrased version, the writing content isn't. It turns out that the 1900-based dating is screwed up "for legacy reasons" (in an unstandardized format that didn't exist in any previous versions??) As the spec states,

"A consequence of this is that for dates between January 1 and February 28, WEEKDAY shall return a value for the day immediately prior to the correct day, so that the (non-existent) date February 29 has a day-of-the-week that immediately follows that of February 28, and immediately precedes that of March 1."

I'd like to read further to try to understand why they're expressing integers as "1.0000000..." instead of "1.0" or even "1", but I'm starting to fear that the Stupid might be contagious.

If you take 15 minutes of your time, download the two standards documents for ODF and OOXML (OK depending on download speed a bit longer than 15 minutes for the latter) and browse through them quickly, glancing at the topics and the descriptions a bit, maybe reading a paragraph or 3 in depth, then you would have spent less time than you needed to write your long post and you wouldn't have to write "i am not a document expert" because you'd know about as much about both ODF and OOXML as the average slashdotter :-)

Note that Java and C#, which are sometimes seen as replacements for C++, are proprietary languages

If it's standardized, can it be proprietary?

"ooxml is not a documented and freely implementable standard. your argumentation is therefore in all cases false."

It's documented right here: http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/sta ndards/Ecma-376.htm
And it's freely implementable. Hell, there numerous pieces of sample code at http://openxmldeveloper.org/ showing how to read, write, and manipulate OOXML files.

Try coming up with arguments that aren't so readily disproved next time. You guys make this too damn easy.

I'd say you are a bit lost in all the overcomplexifabulactions you perceive to exist. In fact you have gotten so overwhelmed that you forgot to mention input/output with printers and more devices than I or you know about.

It took three hundred year for the wide spread application the Hindu-Arabic system, after it was introduced.
In comparison it took about 350 years for the catholic church to finally accept Galileo's observations.
This happened in the early 1990's and to verify I mean like less than 20 years ago.

Why? Politics of course! The church changed because they were losing supporters because of their silly position of punishing someone who was being apparently more honesty than they. Mathematics change took generations to overcome the politics and population growth enough to make fail the roman numeral systems use in mathematics and accounting (numbers got to big). Today the Computer Science courses are losing Students and trying to recapture interest. Some example are "Computational Thinking" and "Great Principles of Computing" efforts (google them).

What might a Roman Numeral Accountant promote in order to protect their elite social status and income? Only a fool would think nothing can have value. And so it is often the case of wrong teachings that program people to think in terms that limit their ability to comprehend what more is possible. Fixing that requires deprogramming.

Programming is the act of automating complexity and supplying it an easier to use interface so the user of the complexity can use and reuse it and even incorporate it in other automations of complexity. It is a recursive act.

Regardless of what programming language you use, the machine needs to see transistor states and changes of on or off. As a first level abstraction, we call this binary. For any program you write, regardless or what language you write it in or any other factors such as interpreted or compiled etc., the hardware needs to see binary. The fundamental technology upon what a computer is built is the two state transistor providing three states, on, off and not accessed.

There is translation involved in programming, perhaps even multiple levels of translations.

program written in programing language x -----> translation levels ---> binary machine perspective.

If you want to get all complexifabulcated as to what goes on in the translation levels for any particular language, then you are being to subjective to the area of problem and will only perhaps see symptoms of the problem, not the cause.. You have to be objective, step away to see a bigger picture, in order to see the problem.

Microsoft tried to quantize the more common and popular programming languages. Anyone could have done this, but MS was most likely as they do not innovate but rather try to own and/or control what others have done. They didn't even own MSDOS when they sold it to IBM. Of course there is the MS bias of application of the summing.

Anyways, MS produced out of the summing of programing languages the CLI (Common Language Infrastructure).
http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/sta ndards/Ecma-335.htm

It was the summing of programming concepts and data-type with the integration done to avoid conflicts. This is at the core of what is better know as .net. You can write programs using any number of languages. Then it is translated into a Common Intermediate Language (CIL) which is then run off a run time engine which does the final translation into binary perceivable by the hardware.

You mentioned symptoms of the problem such as:

"In point of fact, almost every abstraction is a loss of power." That is not a fact at all. It is abstraction that enables us to do more. If there is any power loss it is only as a result of losing touch with, or access to, the elements of the abstraction ladder. And that is a symptom of the problem

C# is available on other platforms such as Linux through the Mono project, for example this article titled C# and .NET Without Microsoft. Also since the introduction of Silverlight Microsoft can allow other OS' to run a subset of .NET code -- maybe even coded in C# -- through a browser plug-in. You've fallen into the trap of thinking C# = Windows which is not true. Do some reading of these links and you'll be amazed what C# really is. Also as an EMCA specification it's not likely to be tied to a platform any more than any other international standard.

The Office Open XML (OOXML) format created by Microsoft is an open standard, Standard ECMA-376. There is no need for Microsoft to support a competing standard such as ODF, unless it becomes the de facto standard, which is rather unlikely.

Visual Basic does, in fact, run on .Net, so if that is what you mean by drawing closer, then yes. I suspect that is not what you mean however :) Perhaps if you spent actual time writing C# code you'd be able to better understand the differences it has from Java and the benefits it has over C++ and C for those applications to which it is best suited. Having come from a C++/C background myself, I definitely appreciate how much more clean the language is.

And C# runs on Linux, supported by the Mono guys. And it's so proprietary it's a standard, see http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/sta ndards/Ecma-334.htm. Nor is it byte-code interpreted. It's JITed which, if you don't know what that means, you certainly aren't qualified to discuss modern Java or C# implementations.

Here's what ECMA says:
http://www.ecma-international.org/memento/index.ht ml

Checkout the chairpersons for the following technical committees:

Programming and Scripting Languages:
http://www.ecma-international.org/memento/TC39.htm

Office Open XML Formats:
http://www.ecma-international.org/memento/TC45.htm

Here's what ECMA says:
http://www.ecma-international.org/memento/index.ht ml

Checkout the chairpersons for the following technical committees:

Programming and Scripting Languages:
http://www.ecma-international.org/memento/TC39.htm

Office Open XML Formats:
http://www.ecma-international.org/memento/TC45.htm

Here's what ECMA says:
http://www.ecma-international.org/memento/index.ht ml

Checkout the chairpersons for the following technical committees:

Programming and Scripting Languages:
http://www.ecma-international.org/memento/TC39.htm

Office Open XML Formats:
http://www.ecma-international.org/memento/TC45.htm

The Wikipedia list is not a complete list. Try here instead to see other standards backed by Siemens, IBM, Sony, HP, Toshiba, Philips, Boeing, Xerox, Fujifilm, Intel, Apple and Adobe, to name but a few.

Describing ECMA as "a rubber stamp for Microsoft" shows a lack of knowledge. Wikipedia doesn't have all the answers, sometimes it's worth doing some real research.

I don't understand this mention about being certified by ECMA. Granted, I'm not well versed in the document format wars, but I've never heard of this outfit. A brief glance at their "standards list" looks to me they simply allow corporations to take their existing technology and call them a "standard". So guess how surprised I was, when I took a look at the page on "Office Open XML Formats"

Is it me, or is that "certification" highly suspect?

As a consumer, I expect standards to come before commercial implementations, such as we've seen here regarding the many 802.11n progress updates. I want standards to be smart, not just come from a de facto implementation. I want many interested parties working together to hammer out an acceptable standard, so that I won't be told that I need Internet Explorer to view some lazy slob's web page. I think the free market would benefit if competition would not be between so-called "standards", but between implementations.

It looks like it's also about money to me. And when it comes to money, Microsoft is the last entity I would trust.

Check your own national standards organisation and see if they too are seeking submissions.

The outcome of the Ecma report can be had here http://www.ecma-international.org/news/TC45_curren t_work/Ecma%20responses.pdf

http://www.ecma-international.org/news/TC45_curren t_work/TC45-2006-50_final_draft.htm

I've actually looked at OpenXML, read the licensing and have some development experience with it.

How much time have you spent looking at OpenXML before coming to your ...

That's all there's to it

... statement?

You have information that says Novell has access to "secret" documentation regarding OpenXML?

I think it is your argument that is disingenuous and lacks all validity. You're in denial that Microsoft could possibly open up it's Office formats in the same way that Sun has done with Star Office. This is exactly what they have done.

Docx documents are simply zip files containing simple xml files, it's not even half as complicated as people are implying. Creating docx documents is actually quite simple...

http://blogs.msdn.com/dmahugh/archive/2006/06/27/6 49007.aspx

I've seen it all on slashdot today, half of the comments rated up against posts I've made are claiming the 6000 pages of documentation is too complicated and difficult to follow, the other half claim they are incomplete and I bet not a single one of these people have even looked at the documentation:

http://www.ecma-international.org/news/TC45_curren t_work/TC45-2006-50_final_draft.htm

It doesn't matter what cross platform specification there is out there, there are always be difficulties producing identical replications of a standard between platforms, just look at SOAP and HTML for examples, everyone knows the problems developing HTML applications that work across multiple browsers. Does that mean HTML or SOAP are not valid standards? Of course it doesn't.

The truth is there is an abundance of information and examples on how to create, read and modify Office 2007 OpenXml documents.

With Office 2007 Microsoft has opened the floodgates for developers and turned it into a full on document processing development platform. I think Microsoft has done this because they genuinely believe they can offer a commercial product that will be bought based on the merits of the application versus applications such as Star Office and/or Open Office.

It was originally called 'Managed Extensions for C++' or just 'MC++' for short back with VS2002.NET and it was ugly. Because the language was still ANSI Standard C++ compiler specific keywords had to start with a double under-score making its readability close to zero. With VS2005 MS have created a new language C++/CLI which has been accepted as a new standard by ECMA - 'Standard ECMA-372' - http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/sta ndards/Ecma-372.htm Thanks to the new keywords the flow of the language is much more natural and C++ is now considered a first-class .NET language - the only in fact, that lets you mix and match managed and unmanaged code - so you don't have to throw away all of your MFC and ATL libraries, and can extend existing frameworks with managed controls. It's also much closer to the CLI than any other language so you can perform tweaks that no other language can do. If we'd had this back in the days of .NET v1 I doubt whether C# would've taken off much more than VB.NET - now everyone's a C# programmer and a good C++ programmer is even harder to find than they used to be. In short, C# is the new VB - programming for the masses. For server based, semi real-time/distributed systems work the good news is that C++/CLI has caught up (and overtaken) the rest of the world. 'C++/CLI In Action' from Manning Publications is a good book. Regards, Duncan.

What are you people talking about !?

Our standard is more standard than your standard. What sort of childish argument is this?

Look here where it states...

The work to standardise OpenXML has been carried out by Ecma International as part of an open, cross-industry collaboration via Technical Committee 45 (Ecma TC45), which includes representatives from Apple, Barclays Capital, BP, The British Library, Essilor, Intel, Microsoft, NextPage, Novell, Statoil, Toshiba, and the United States Library of Congress.

Most of the standards that get created these days have a major corporate backer from which the majority of the work in development of the standard has taken place. It becomes a standard when it is accepted by other representatives of the development community. Who better to offer standards on word processing formats than the #1 leader in word processing on the planet. Like it or not Microsoft is that leader, not Sun who is the major backer of Open Office. I think your whole argument is based on some childish inability to accept that.

I've worked with Office 2007 xml formats, they are extremely easy to work with very powerful and extremely accessible. Microsoft has actually astonished me with the fantastic work they have done and the way in which they have provided support for Office 2007 formats in Office 2000, Office XP and Office 2003. I think the days of forced migrations are genuinely in the past. People are going to move to Office 2007 and Open XML formats for one reason only and that is a genuine value added benefit. Specifically from Office 2007's tight integration and it's connectivity with Sharepoint. The format of Office 2007's documents is not going to be a motivation for upgrading.

I think Microsoft is taking the right approach and has the right attitude on this one and that your comments are totally based on emotional and heavily biased opinions.

Start here:

http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Core_JavaScri pt_1.5_Guide

(Yes, those are the Netscape docs from 10 years ago. No one read them then, either.)

If you're brave, I also recommend the ECMA specs:

http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/sta ndards/Ecma-262.htm

All the Web APIs you need to go with that can be found at the source:

http://www.w3.org/

I don't need to do the work for you. I am satisfied that the technology is encumbered. As I said I have spent a lot of time reviewing the ECMA documents, and as a result I understand the situation. If you can't bother to read the documents, I can't be bothered to hold your hand and spoon feed you the information. The ECMA policy documents are easily read at their web site http://weww.ecma-international.org/

Actually, .Net is an implementation of the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI, ECMA-335 ), just like Mono is. .Net only runs on Microsoft supported platforms while Mono tries to run on many more. The fact that .Net isn't cross-platform doesn't matter, because it is Microsoft's, what do you expect? But that does not necessarily mean CLI is Microsoft's. The way I see it, Mono is a cross platform implementation of CLI trying to be as compatible with Microsoft's .Net as possible. And like the guy below wrongly said, .Net/Mono isn't a language, all these confusions about are what make unknowing people accuse and put C# ( ECMA-334 ) and/or CLI down.

Actually, .Net is an implementation of the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI, ECMA-335 ), just like Mono is. .Net only runs on Microsoft supported platforms while Mono tries to run on many more. The fact that .Net isn't cross-platform doesn't matter, because it is Microsoft's, what do you expect? But that does not necessarily mean CLI is Microsoft's. The way I see it, Mono is a cross platform implementation of CLI trying to be as compatible with Microsoft's .Net as possible. And like the guy below wrongly said, .Net/Mono isn't a language, all these confusions about are what make unknowing people accuse and put C# ( ECMA-334 ) and/or CLI down.

Both C# and CIL are ECMA standards, and are also approved by ISO/IEC here and here respectively.

There are also a few companies working on projects that use these standards in their products. So even if you don't want to use Microsoft products, you can still use C# or any other language that compiles for .NET with something like Mono on most of the popular desktop/server operating systems today.

Both C# and CIL are ECMA standards, and are also approved by ISO/IEC here and here respectively.

There are also a few companies working on projects that use these standards in their products. So even if you don't want to use Microsoft products, you can still use C# or any other language that compiles for .NET with something like Mono on most of the popular desktop/server operating systems today.

That's great! Your knowledge would be extremely beneficial to others. What is the product you are working on? Do you have a list of the problems?

Presumably the errors in XML case or spelling can be compared against the existing electronic schema (http://www.ecma-international.org/news/TC45_curre nt_work/TC45-2006-50_final_draft.htm/). In which case the schema obviously wins out, so I would see this as a minor typo that is easily fixed. In the case that Office couldn't read a document because an additional path component - isn't Office implemented with a different version of the schema (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?f amilyid=15805380-f2c0-4b80-9ad1-2cb0c300aef9&displ aylang=en/)? In any case, flaws exist in software and documentation and always will.

I also assume you have sent your concerns to ECMA and Microsoft so that the specification can be improved if required. Is the issue that your concerns have been ignored?

I'm afraid this is not entirely correct. While it is true (as far as we can discern at this point) that Microsoft plans on making and keeping the specification freely available, it is most certainly not "implementable". This is clear from the article that the parent posted to (search for the word legacy). It is even more clear in Grokdoc's document containing objections to the ISO-standardization of Microsoft's OOXML-specification.

In layman's terms, the specification (which should be complete and exact) contains phrases like "implement this like in Word95" (search for "autoSpaceLikeWord95" on page 1378 in part 4), without defining exactly what this means. As a result, only Microsoft is able to implement this specification. Hence the Microsoft-specification does not meet the open standards definition formulated by the European Union.

the specs for these formats are going to be so complicated that nobody will be able to open the file in a text editor and just read through it.

I have untarred several documents from the ODF family and found them easy to understand. I would suggest you do the same as the software to create these files is Free. If you can't be arsed to do that, then stop writing inane commentary. :)

The specification for ODF is available online. Since that is the case, please attempt to read it before spouting-off about it being unreadable. It is 722 pages long, I've had a brief look at it and it seems very readable (better than that: it looks implementable!)

In my opinion Microsoft's format is neither XML, or open. It's binary, patentable cruft in an XML wrapper. So it's best not to describe it as an 'XML Format' at all. The specification for this is reportedly 6,000 pages long. This is also available online.

The advantages of XML file formats are:

• Increased Robustness
• Document Archiving
• Version Interoperability
• Documented and Transparent File Content
• Standards Based
• Easy Import and Export of Other File Formats
• Search Engines / Knowledge Management Systems

All of these were copied from the OpenOffice Web Site, explanation of the items in that list can be found there.

Haha, do you guys know that C# is an open standard, and so is CLI (.Net). I suggest you read the Mono FAQ, it will go over anything I can say a lot better.

I'm just surprised because I hear many people putting Mono and C# down pretty quickly when, when in fact thanks to these things, there have been quite a few innovative things done on the Desktop for Linux, including Banshee, Tomboy, Beagle, and many many more.

Typically the reason for such comments is either ignorance (I don't mean to troll, just trying to think of what can be the cause), as in, the people don't really know the situation, or just doing it because everyone else does it. There's a whole Mono section in the current issue of Linux Format Magazine which seems to kind of inform people on just how Mono is benefiting the Open Source community.

The point isn't for everyone to like it, but at least respect it, after all it's just another Open Source initiative/project and we all should stick together :) Just curious why there's such behavior/attitude towards it.

Haha, do you guys know that C# is an open standard, and so is CLI (.Net). I suggest you read the Mono FAQ, it will go over anything I can say a lot better.

I'm just surprised because I hear many people putting Mono and C# down pretty quickly when, when in fact thanks to these things, there have been quite a few innovative things done on the Desktop for Linux, including Banshee, Tomboy, Beagle, and many many more.

Typically the reason for such comments is either ignorance (I don't mean to troll, just trying to think of what can be the cause), as in, the people don't really know the situation, or just doing it because everyone else does it. There's a whole Mono section in the current issue of Linux Format Magazine which seems to kind of inform people on just how Mono is benefiting the Open Source community.

The point isn't for everyone to like it, but at least respect it, after all it's just another Open Source initiative/project and we all should stick together :) Just curious why there's such behavior/attitude towards it.

The only thing we deal with on a day-to-day basis in IT that has its name on it is ECMAScript.

This one too. I wonder if it has VBA inside it...

1. To Produce a formal Standard for office productivity documents which is fully compatible with the Office Open XML Formats

2.15.3.51 suppressTopSpacingWP (Emulate WordPerfect 5.x Line Spacing) This element specifies that applications shall emulate the behavior of a previously existing word processing application (WordPerfect 5.x) ...

You accidentally misspellt second to last in your post...