Domain: griffinbrown.co.uk
Stories and comments across the archive that link to griffinbrown.co.uk.
Comments · 9
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Re:aw, come on, it's not that bad.
Microsoft only fails Transitional OOXML on one count, which is that one function returns the wrong type of positive result, which you can find from the blog of the guy who originally tested it:
Sure enough (again) the result is as expected: relatively few messages (84) are emitted and they are all of the same type complaining e.g. of the element:
since the allowed attribute values for val are now "true", "false", etc. this was one of the many tidying-up exercices performed at the BRM
You can find a list of other supported implementations here: ECMA 376 implementations.
I'm not paid to write crap like this, it's all my own work I'm afraid to say. What about your crap? Do you get paid to write that, or are you a freelance crapper like myself?
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Re:OOo and ODF compliance?
Here. 7,525 validation errors. He's the same guy that reported that MSOffice had about 122,000 OOXML errors.
Though I admit that I have some doubts about his methodology for the ODF test. -
Re:OOo and ODF compliance?
Here. 7,525 validation errors. He's the same guy that reported that MSOffice had about 122,000 OOXML errors.
Though I admit that I have some doubts about his methodology for the ODF test. -
Re:The map is not the territory.
There's a set of RELAX NG XML Schemas for the Transitional and Strict OOXML specs that are trivial enough to use with something like jing [thaiopensource.com]; what more do you want?
I've already seen examples of MOO-XML that are compliant to the schema but won't load in Office. I would link to the blog in question, but searching for "office not compliant OOXML" now chokes up so many links (mostly about how bad it is) that I had trouble finding it.
The page you're looking for is this one. Certainly, that's what the Slashdot story (and most of the pages that come up in the Google search) used as a source.
Oh, and look, he states how he got his results: "...a set of the RELAX NG schemas for the (post-BRM) revision of OOXML ... use[ing] jing (or similar)...".
Now doesn't that look familiar? Yup, it's exactly what I said in my post. Know why? Because that was the source I used for my post.indentLikeWord97
... you have no idea from reading the schema OR the standard how to implement it. Your only recourse would be to get a copy of Word97, and reverse-engineer a painstaking model of how it indented things, and implement that yourself...I assume you're thinking of AutoSpaceLikeWord95, there's no tag "indentlikeword97" (or at least if there is, googling for it gives no results).
And yeah, you could painstakingly reverse-engineer Word 95, work out how that implemented autospacing, and copy that.
Or you could, I dunno, read the spec . Or, at least, any version of the spec since about a year ago, when the ECMA released the relevent appendix with the deprecated tag documentation. But, hey, I guess it's easier to parrot other Slashdot posters who haven't read the spec and are themselves quoting yet older posts, until you get to a year ago and someone who has read the spec and was posting about their concerns which, back then, were perfectly valid.
For your edification:2.15.3.6 autoSpaceLikeWord95 (Incorrectly Adjust Text Spacing for Specific Unicode Ranges)
This element specifies adjustments (detailed below) which should be applied to the spacing between adjoining regions of non-ideographic and ideographic text when the autoSpaceDE (Â2.3.1.2) and autoSpaceDN (Â2.3.13) elements have a value of true (or equivalent). This algorithm typically results in the following:- An increase in the inter-character spacing added between non-ideographic and/or number characters and certain full-width characters
- No inter-character spacing between non-ideographic and/or number characters and certain half-width characters
Typically, applications apply additional spacing between ideographic and non-ideographic characters/numeric characters when the autoSpaceDE / autoSpaceDN properties are applied. This element, when present with a val attribute value of true (or equivalent), specifies that applications shall apply the following adjustments to this logic:
Characters in the following Unicode ranges should be treated as ideographic, even though those characters are full-width forms of non-ideographic text: U+FF10-U+FF19, U+FF21-U+FF3A, and U+FF41-U+FF5A. [Note: This results in the unnecessary addition of space. end note]
Characters in the following Unicode ranges should be treated as non-ideographic, even though those characters are ideographic: U+FF66-U+FF9F. [Note: This results in the omission of the intended additional space. end note]
[Example: Consider a WordprocessingML document with two paragraphs containing a mix of East Asian and Latin characters:
ab cd ab cd
The first paragraph contains characters with Unicode value U+FF66 (). The second paragraph contains characters with Unicode -
Re:I am lost?OOXML is not widely implemented nor widely used at this point In fact, OOXML is not implemented AT ALL in ANY product, according to the leader of ISO Alex Brown: http://www.griffinbrown.co.uk/blog/PermaLink,guid,3e2202cd-59a3-4356-8f30-b8eb79735e1a.aspx
--Joe -
OOXML can and has been independently implemented.
Would you care to give an example of such an independent implementation? According to Alex Brown, the person who convened the Ballot Resolution Meeting for ISO/IEC, Microsoft's own current current implementation does not conform to the 'standard'
Ah, NOW I see what you mean. Why, in fact, I've just implemented the standard myself right here:
main(){exit(1);}
What do you mean my implementation doesn't conform? Neither does Microsoft's. -
Groklaw article is misleadingFrom the original blog post http://www.griffinbrown.co.uk/blog/PermaLink,guid,3e2202cd-59a3-4356-8f30-b8eb79735e1a.aspx:
The TRANSITIONAL conformance model is quite a bit closer to the original Ecma 376. Countries at the BRM (rather more than Ecma, as it happened) were very keen to keep compatibilty with Ecma 376 and to preserve XML structures at which legacy Office features could be targetted. The expectation is therefore that an MS Office 2007 document should be pretty close to valid according to the TRANSITIONAL schema. Sure enough (again) the result is as expected: relatively few messages (84) are emitted and they are all of the same type complaining e.g. of the element: since the allowed attribute values for val are now "true", "false", etc. -- this was one of the many tidying-up exercices performed at the BRM.
Groklaw seems to have sexed up the results of the test to prove their case IMO. -
Re:What kind of BS is that? "Strict Standard?"Your quote was from the GrokLaw summary, which used some creative editing of the original blog posting to create drama and brouhaha. It's important to go to the actual article that GrokLaw was quoting and get the information from the source.
Based on the actual root article, the results from the transitional version was nearly perfect, with 84 instances of the same (very minor) class of error.
From TFA: The TRANSITIONAL conformance model is quite a bit closer to the original Ecma 376. Countries at the BRM (rather more than Ecma, as it happened) were very keen to keep compatibilty with Ecma 376 and to preserve XML structures at which legacy Office features could be targetted. The expectation is therefore that an MS Office 2007 document should be pretty close to valid according to the TRANSITIONAL schema.
Sure enough (again) the result is as expected: relatively few messages (84) are emitted and they are all of the same type complaining e.g. of the element:<m:degHide m:val="on"/>
since the allowed attribute values for val are now "true", "false", etc. this was one of the many tidying-up exercices performed at the BRM. This is a simple (and very common in this sort of thing) error, and not too surprising or worrisome. It's basically a very minor errata.
This is actually quite impressive, given that the transitional version is not the same as what MS originally proposed, and so there was also little expectation that a document format created in the past would be conformant. It looks like the groups went to some effort to make sure that the transitional version was nearly 100% compatible with what MS Office 2007 actually emits.
And it shouldnt be surprising to anyone that Office 2007 doesnt conform to the strict version. The strict version was semi-major surgery on what MS proposed. And it was developed long after Office 2007 was released.
More from TFA: Validating against the STRICT model
The STRICT conformance model is quite a bit different from Ecma 376, essentially because most of that format's most notorious features (non ISO dates, compatibility settings like autospacewotnot, VML, etc.) have been removed. Thus the expectation is that existing Office 2007 documents might be some distance away from being valid according to the strict schemas.
Sure enough, jing emitted 17MB (around 122,000) of invalidity messages when validating in this scenario. Most of them seem to involve unrecognised attributes or attribute values: I would expect a document which exercised a wider range of features to generate a more diverse set of error message. Again, to restate. The strict version of ISO OOXML (what causes all the errors in validation) is NOT based on the current version of MS Office 2007. Therefore there is no reason to expect that Office 2007 docs would be fully compliant. The strict version did not exist when Office 2007 was created, therefore it was not possible for them to be conformant to it.
To do so would have required them to predict into the future the path that ISO would take.
Now the interesting question will be whether MS aligns with the strict ISO OOXML in a future Office 2007 Service Pack, or even if they clean up that one minor issue found here (on/off vs. true/false in attributes).
The strict version breaks alot of backwards compatibility with legacy documents that were created in much older versions of office and forward converted. Given that, I'll be interested to see what MS does with this over the next year or two as their releases catch up to the ISO standards. -
Validates better against the TRANSITIONAL specSpeaking as an OOX implementer, this is pretty bad. But it's not quite as bad as the headline makes it seem - the meat of the story is linked a few blogs deep:
The expectation is therefore that an MS Office 2007 document should be pretty close to valid according to the TRANSITIONAL schema.
Sure enough (again) the result is as expected: relatively few messages (84) are emitted and they are all of the same type.
<m:degHide m:val="on"/> where "val's" values are supposed to be "true|false".
[snip]
Making them conform to the TRANSITIONAL will require less of the same sort of surgery (since they're quite close to conformant as-is)
In other words, if you're validating against the TRANSITIONAL spec, the OOX documents aren't horribly far off. And it's wrong in such a way that's easy to compensate for in code (i.e. check for "true|on" for a truth value). That's a markedly different situation than described by the headline's "'somewhat less' with the transitional OOXML schema" claim.
And in case anyone claims that ODF doesn't have the same sort of problem, I refer you to AbiWord bug 11359/OpenOffice bug 64237. This one is a show-stopper.