Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Just Says No to .Doc Replacement Panel
Schlemphfer writes "OASIS is a nonprofit consortium backed by top technology companies, and the purpose of this organization is to set open standards for desktop and business software. They've just announced a working group that will create an XML-based document format standard for openoffice.org. And even though Microsoft is a member of Oasis, they aren't going to be taking part in this group. It's a logical move on Bill's part, considering that standardized XML docs are sure to weaken the hold that Microsoft's proprietary .doc format has on business software."
Yes, MS isn't going to open up one of its proprietary license. Especially one that is so widely used. If this comes as a surprise, you need to soak your head.
But, I guess everyone will have a great time bashing MS for doing the obvious...
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
I was under the impression that Microsoft Office 11 was promoting their own??? version of XML. If that is the case, I am sure that BillG wouldn't want anything else as a standard
What's wrong with RTF or straight-up ascii?
--- Do you believe in the day?
...or did i dream that?
No they aren't. Microsoft has the market 95% locked up. What they say, goes.
Isn't Microsoft .doc format based on XML already?
Chicken Little anybody?
Why should Microsoft change formats? They are presently in a position (in regards to office software) where they can force their own "standards" on everyone else. They continue to dominate because there are not reliable, transparent converters. If they were to adopt a document format where other companies software could edit documents created by Word, there would be little reason to stay with Office. I personally always use plaintext wherever I can, I don't want to rely on any document format (no matter how common) to continue to exist for long periods of time.
"XDocs," the code name for a new product in the Microsoft Office family, streamlines the process of gathering information by enabling teams and organizations to easily create and work with rich, dynamic forms. The information collected can be integrated with a broad range of business processes because XDocs supports any customer-defined XML schema and integrates with XML Web services. As a result, XDocs helps to connect information workers directly to organizational information and gives them the ability to act on it, which leads to greater business impact.
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Cheese it! It's the FEDS!
an love fest for open standards that might jeopardize their business? In case you haven't noticed they have huge share in the office software business! Hell, I wouldn't join either. Why should they pander to competitors...to be nice?
"You helped our nation celebrate its bicentennial in 17 -- 1976." --George W. Bush, to Queen Elizabeth, Wash
I can still call Bill a wanker and feel pure in my thoughts.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
That way we replace both .doc and .pdf at once.
If this turns out to be something that we feel (is necessary) for customers, we can join, but currently we'll just wait and see," he said. i'm glad someone else is here to make a decision on what is necessary for me. i hate making decisions like that.
- First, although XML seems more 'open', in reality it is simply a higher-level encoding that may or may not be easier to understand but is guaranteed to both take longer to parse and take up more space than the conventional
.doc format because of the size of the tags, making this a downgrade 'optimization' of both speed and size -- where is the win here?
- Microsoft owns
.doc, however XML is still a wildcard; are there submarine patents on the technology running silent and deep waiting for just the right moment to blow a hole in Microsoft's pocketbook? We've talked about this sort of thing on ./ before.
- Lack of features -- there's a reason people are still using
.doc and .pdf instead of HTML, and giving HTML a fancier name for the new millenium isn't going to change it. Anything tougher than bold, italics, and tables has been proven to be an O(n^2) representation in HTML and has been neglected because nobody wants to download a meg of webpage.
So please, understand that while it would be cool for Microsoft to adopt these new standards, economically speaking they're doing the right thing.Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
Proven in court. Why would they turn away from monopolistic behavior when their punishment for it is negligable?
Office is the cash cow, and they have done their best to eliminate viable competition.
The only reason that Corel Wordperfect lives on is the legal community, and a few bullheaded supporters that will not change. (not that refusal to change is bad in this case.)
Why would anyone logically think that they would embrace a standard that will put their competitors on an equal playing field?
A standard that they cannot "extend" easily at this point without lots of bad publicity.
I think that they are going to "wait and see" if it flies, then embrace and extend it after it sticks. It is in their benefit to wait for it to fail, or for more time between their conviction and their extension of this standard. They don't want to get their hand slapped again so soon.
Cuchullain
"If sharing a thing in no way diminishes it, it is not rightly owned if it is not shared." -St. Augustine
something that can open .doc and the new standard.
.qbp or .epd
Call the new standard
Face it, people are stupid, and the internet is the place where they all meet.
If you've an open standard, evil things like competition might come about.
This just in, Sun says No to Java standardization! My point being...BFD? Of course Microsoft isn't keen to join up. Just like any other for-profit company wouldn't join a committee whose purpose was to weaken their market position...
this is the third article concerning microsoft today? At this rate, we will have 6 - 8 articles concerning MS by the end of the day. How wierd is that?
Also, the other thing no one has really noticed has been that Office XP has it's own XML document specification. Even they are starting to get away from the proprietary format.
The chance of there being submarine patents covering the XML standard is pretty small. Read up on the history (SGML etc) and you'll understand why.
-Magnus
Nope, it's no dream... it's a nightmare...It'll be an embraced and extended version of XML that'll totally break every single standard in the place, but then they'll just use their monopoly to cram it down everybody's throats... I can only imagine their hurridly trying to figure out a way to XML executable or some other wacked, half backed idea...
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
No dumb panel should be allowed to replace Dr. No! Bill Gates isn't sharing that title with anyone!
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
First, although XML seems more 'open', in reality it is simply a higher-level encoding that may or may not be easier to understand but is guaranteed to both take longer to parse and take up more space than the conventional .doc format because of the size of the tags, making this a downgrade 'optimization' of both speed and size -- where is the win here?
;-)
.doc and .pdf instead of HTML, and giving HTML a fancier name for the new millenium isn't going to change it. Anything tougher than bold, italics, and tables has been proven to be an O(n^2) representation in HTML and has been neglected because nobody wants to download a meg of webpage.
Funny. I just made a "hello world" document using Word 2000 and it was 19 KB.
Lack of features -- there's a reason people are still using
If you seriously think that XML is just a fancy HTML, then there's no hope of you understanding why this open standard is a good thing in the first place.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
In proper slashdot tradition, I haven't read the article, but maybe those that have the time to do so could enlighten me: Open/StarOffice already has its own XML format that works great (and results in files a hell of a lot smaller than the same document saved as a MS.DOC)... and I doubt the OO people would mind anyone else using that format.
:)
So is this just a committee to maintain and perhaps incrementally enhance the OO format?
Oh, how I long for the day when it will becom economically prudent for Microsoft to include OO import filters in MS Office!
I have no special gift, I am only passionately curious. --Albert Einstein
IMHO, Microsoft's closed office formats are the basis for its monopoly in the Office market. I love LaTeX and use it when I author articles myself. But when I work with others, guess what? I have to use Word.
I've tried using LaTeX with several groups and each group has decided to move back to Word. It is just too familiar, too standard.
The sad part is that I absolutely hate Word as much as I dislike any other program. It has nothing to do with my feelings towards MS. Word is just a poorly done program.
In the real business world, Office will be king until MS opens its format. StarOffice (which I've used quite a bit) is nice, but at 99.5% compatability, it just isn't good enough. No one wants to lose a business deal because they don't use the standard.
I highly doubt MS will ever release its hold on the Office formats. Of course, they are going to XML, but that doesn't mean the format will be open and readable to competitors.
Actually, *all* of the MS Word Docs i've converted to OOo format have ended up smaller.
Just like Unix took over the proprietary OSs on large systems, XML will eliminate proprietary file formats.
Why?
Because the major corporate customers know that proprietary products screw consumers in the long and possibly short run.
If anyone is still in the dark on how a proprietary single source for technology can screw your company, just look at the price increases, license changes and other efforts by Microsoft to screw its own customer base during tough times.
You might expect Microsoft to raise prices and tighten up terms during good times. But, the idiots running Microsoft are so dumb and stupid (that means Gates and Ballmer) that they do so during difficult times.
It is proof positive to avoid doing business with Microsoft Corporation.
Any business.
After all they are looking for more partners to screw.
Do not blame me for the decisions made by Microsoft Corporation. Blame Gates and Ballmer.
NexuSys - Linux support by the best
..People are going to have a much easier time smashing through the Microsoft document formats when they switch to XML.
.rtf (among other formats), and have it open fine in any other well-coded word processing program.
As it stands, should Microsoft be worried? Nope.
MS Office has no equal. Some things are based on their ownership of the most proliferous desktop OS - such as MS Office opening damned near instantly.
The rest, though.. Open Office? Please. Show me the equivalent of Excel, Access and PowerPoint on Linux, or on any other office suite. You won't be able to.
Word.. Word can easily be replaced with even AbiWord. The word processor is a battle that is meaningless. Even MS Office allows you to save in
Where some may insist that Microsoft has an operating system monopoly due to dirty tactics (OEM threats, anyone?), MS Office is king because it kicks ass. It has no equal.
Have a look at this http://www.1dok.org/eng/index.html
The site says : 1dok.org is part of a programme of the Ministry of Economics, Technology and Transport (MWTV) and the Schleswig- Holstein Technology Foundation (TSH) funded out of the Innovative Actions of the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) by the European Commissions GD Regio.
I believe their intention is to base it on OpenOffice format, they want to make it the official office data format for the German government, and may later for all the Europen governments.
It's not that Microsoft didn't *want* to contribute. Here's their proposed DTD:
Once a standards based XML document format is formalized, Microsoft will boldy announce that Office has full support for reading and writing the format. What they won't tell their customers is that when Office writes out such documents, they will most likely embed "custom" features that "extend" the standard that non MS applications will have difficulty understanding and without which things just won't quite look right, thus locking MS Office users in to the same dilemma they have now.
BUT, this can be avoided IF the standards committe carefully structures the standard in such a way to prevent custom incompatible extensions and that any application not adhering to the standard cannot advertise itself as compliant or able to read/write such documents. A good trademark owned by the standards body would assist in enforcing this. Then Microsoft would have to choose either to implement it openly, or not fully support it. This would at least force them to be honest.
I'm interested in where Adobe comes down on this, being a major player in desktop publishing. Standard XML based docs may not be a PDF killer, but could be a Distiller killer, which is most of Adobe's revenue stream from the PDF format.
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
Most people don't care about sharing word documents. MS Word just works better, and they are running windows anyways....
If I was a Microsoft investor, I would say, "Yeah, don't participate." Sitting on the sidelines, however, makes it easier to call this one what it is--a guided missle straight at the heart of Microsoft's applications strategy.
Just watch out for a fake campaign by some bogus coalition of MSFT sympathizers to come up with multiple alternates to whatever is settled on for the standard.
Mocking Microsoft wouldn't be any fun without unnecessary competing standards.
Game: Player 'Donald J Trump' now has AI skill level 'experimental'.
Isn't Microsoft .doc format based on XML already?
Yes, but this doesn't really help a whole lot. XML is a standard for designing document formats, it is not a format in its own right. The fact that Microsoft's format is "based on XML" really only says that they will use HTML-like tags <foo>some text here</foo>, it doesn't say that how their word processor will interpret those tags, or even what the tags will be, etc.
What's wrong with RTF or straight-up ascii?
Try embedding a spreadsheet in RTF, and get back to us (is this question for real ?)
I was under the impression that Microsoft Office 11 was promoting their own??? version of XML. If that is the case, I am sure that BillG wouldn't want anything else as a standard
No, Microsoft are using their own document format. It's not a "version of XML", XML is a specification for writing document formats. It isn't a format in its own right. Bill couldn't care less if something else became standard, but the issue here is convenience. Microsoft may want to be able to add tags to their document format, as they add features to their software. It's really a case of the "not invented here" syndrome -- everyone likes to invent their own format. Even with standards like POSIX, C++, C, and HTML, any vendor of consequence adds their own vendor extensions.
Yes, MS isn't going to open up one of its proprietary license. Especially one that is so widely used. If this comes as a surprise, you need to soak your head.
"Proprietary licenses" are not the issue here. Microsoft are moving to an XML based format, and they already allow developers access to documentation for their formats. Moving to XML will make their formats more accesible -- it might not make much difference to a serious implementor, but it will make it much easier for the average perl hacker to do something with their documents.
The issue is that MS don't want someone else controlling the format that their software uses. It's simply more convenient if you have complete control over the specifications of your format. Compatibility requires some discipline, and possibly a certain amount of inconvenience. Whether or not that inconvenience is worthwhile depends on the merits of the format, which is why Microsoft are playing "wait and see".
In any case, I doubt Microsoft would use a standard format as their native format, at best they would base their native format on a standard and add a bunch of vendor extensions to it.
The article said they're taking a "wait and see" approach. They are free to join at a later date.
Tell your writers to check what MS is doing before putting their foot in their mouth and auto-bashing MS. MS has been talking about Office 11 for weeks now with their new XML based file format. Also they said on this issue they are taking a wait and see approach. Now I fully believe MS will tweak their XML so it's not fully compatible with others, but I'm going wait and see so I can legitimately complain.
Seems to me that MS may be doing this as a (prudant) way to avoid potential conflict-of-interest issues.
As has been reported, they are developing XDocs in the future, and this consortium could potentially be putting together something fairly similar to XDocs.
I doubt MS wants to be involved in something that appears like the whole DDR SDRAM/RDRAM fiasco.
-Jayde
What's a sig?
well of course replace it! who needs a defacto standard that in reality is :-)
dodgy old crap ?
Not surprising since OOo uses compression on its files (or is that StarOffice 6 -- one of the two does internal compression on its files).
"....and giving HTML a fancier name for the new millenium isn't going to change it."
Please educate yourself.
[alk]
When installing Microsoft office you get to choose from a huge list of import and export options, grantend its not gonna be like the BeOS OS wide fileformat mudules (were they called translators?) but its reasonable to asume that file in and export is pretty modular. If so then all we need is a comercial developer to licence/nda away their soul to ms and get the api docs. Not to get the people who already have this project up at sourceforge reverse engineering it for free, but I have a feeling this api is even worse then the word format itself. They went trough the same "backward compatible, just totally diffrend with every version" dance hand in hand. Developing an export plugin with this api should be posible and optimising it for automated conversion could be done (visual basic for applications is documented and should do the trick for converting batches of docs for the xml diehards). As a recall the trail only covered the microsoft operating system monopoly, not the office one but as microsft is convicted of abusing its monopoly its unlikely it will be able to come up with legal reason not to licence this api (perhaps the dmca, but hey) so mentioning having a rich uncle who would finance a lawsuit might get the conversation going. If you get the money you can get this done, and having spend some bofh time I know some corporate people would pay almost anything to be abble to open the text files they get in their mail by them self without having to walk into "mision control" on a daily basis to ask for help ;-)
I fully expect MS version of "XML based .doc" to be simply a base-64 encode of the .doc we have today, enclosed in a pair of XML-tags.
Thinking "Oh, it's XML! Then we can all understand what it says!" is naive.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
<xml>
<document type="ms-word">
<data>aksljdflkaj31948lksadjfmn232.....</data>
</document>
</xml>
Ahh, open standards at work over in Redmond.
Why dont you write a post explaining why, rather then just flaming away. There is barely any content in this post, but it got a score of 5. Why?
In related news, slashdot.org has changed its mission statement. Instead of bringing you the latest _news_ (which is now done more effectively by Google), they are now commited to keeping you up to date on each and every way MicroSoft protects its assets, screws it's customers, and opens the web to anyone by spreading software with severe security holes. After the physical move of the servers a while ago, the editors now announce the immediate move of the site to the new domain: slashdot.microsoft.com .
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
XML is much easier to reverse engineer than .doc
Has it occured to anyone that we may soon see a new type of cross-media virus?
I know there've been viruses that could spread via multiple media, like email and ISS cracks, combined, but there really haven't been any that could insert Word macros.
I know this sounds like a security-by-obscurity argument, but it isn't. Hear me out:
With an open format, it not only becomes possible to infect documents from outside MS Office, but it'll be possible for viruses to use that medium as a back door to gain entrance to other platforms entirely, (like unprotected *nixes and Apple products. Heck, even BeOS.) with whatever privelidges the opener of the document has.
Even mail clients with OfficeML (my name for it) support may be at risk.
Just something to keep in mind next time you receive a document as email. And one more reason to redirect root's mail to a normal user.
What's this Submit thingy do?
Is MS going to allow Word to READ this new standard? What about writing to it?
.rtf formatted text.
If MS word has NO compatibility with this standard, it may kill it out of the box. Especially since almost every office suite can already read
hmmmm?
OOo (and Star Office 6) simply zips its files up. Try zipping the .doc and see if it gets anywhere close to the .sxw file.
You always need some sort of code to work with a given format of XML data. You can't just feed an XML document into your browser, and expect your browser to magically turn into a full-featured word processor. Word processing software will have to have support for specific XML document formats. While I agree that MS should use an open standard, the truth is Sun will end up reading and writing XDocs.
Microsoft Office file formats are the lynchpin to their dominance of the computer software world. Because everyone has Office, no one can switch since the defacto exchange format is MS Office docs. Small companies/organizations can effect wholesale change to some degree but still have difficulty trying to interact with other businesses. Non-techs don't understand why you can't read their Word doc b/c what else could you be using? This causes pain for anybody who tries to switch and the quickest relief of pain is to fork out a few hundred smackers for a copy of Office.
Microsoft also enforces its planned obsolesence in the same way. Since new machines only come with the new version of Office, any existing organization is eventually infected with the 'upgraded' versions (complete with their 'smart' features that are either annoying or useless to 99% of the consumer base). Once these documents begin to float around and not open quite right in old versions of Office, everyone needs to upgrade. Otherwise, countless billable hours will be lost to futzing with file formats. $400 for an Office license quickly pays for itself when you're billed out at $50-$100 per hour. Its not the most desireable path, but for a struggling business, its the quickest pain relief available.
File formats also further entrence the Windows operating system. Clearly, linux and unix are out with no native MS Office suite. While I admire the open source projects and their ability to continually reverse engineer the moving target of MS file formats, it is impossible to keep up and they can never provide 100% compatibility which is imperative for a working daily interaction with MS Office users. Even on the Mac with Office X (touted by MS ads for its full compatibility), there are roadblocks to easy transion. My wife uses Office at work because she has to interact with others who do. She recently tried to move to Mac but couldn't because her files weren't quite right. The symbols didn't translate correctly, which might not bother business folk, but as a scientist, it meant that all her technical papers would require endless fixing just to do a little work at hoem. So she's back to a Microsoft Windows box. How fortunate for Redmond that the software they supplied wasn't capable enough for her to make the 'switch'.
All of this hinges on the ability of Office to maintain a closed file format. It keeps users trapped in Office due to compatibility with their coworkers and colleagues. It forces users to upgrade their perfectly good software and shell out more $$$ to MS just because someone else in the office has a new machine. It locks users into the blessed Windows OS again solely for the sake of compatibility and ease of document exchange. MS will never agree to a default open file format for its applications as it would break their stranglehold on both office productivity software and operating systems, the only two profitable portions of their business. Even the new XML formats that promise self describing data storage will only pay lip service to the critics as they wrap up their proprietary binary formats in easy to read, text tags.
This week we learned that Windows and Office are the heart of Microsoft's monopoly, financially speaking.
Office, one of MS's two profitable divisions, gives Microsoft a 79% profit margin for each product sold. I have a feeling that if your average Joe only KNEW about openoffice.org as an alternative, they'd use it in a heartbeat. Businesses might be harder to convince, but when I told my dad about OO.o, he just about shat himself. $400 saved.
If the Internet community can raise $100K (in what was it, 5 weeks?!) to free Blender, surely if given enough time we could raise a million for say, a Superbowl or Oscar ad in 2004. I'm sure there's more than one corporate competitor of Microsoft's that wouldn't mind kicking Bill in the financial balls by making a modest contribution to the OO.o publicity effort.
I can see the ad now...
"Coming up next, the Oscar for Best Picture..."
CUT TO BLACK.
FADE UP:
MEDIUM SHOT OF a SILVER CD-ROM on a DESK with "openoffice.org" scrawled in BLACK SHARPIE.
AS WE SLOWLY ZOOM IN TO THE CD-ROM...
ANNOUNCER: Hey, America. Four hundred bucks is too much to pay for Office software, don't you think? But now there's an alternative you can download for free and copy for your friends. It's called OpenOffice.org. The people who make the "monopoly" version of Office don't want you to know about it. But we do. So visit www.Openoffice.org and give it a try. This message was paid for by thousands of Internet users around the world who thought you should know about alternatives to supporting the monopoly.
TEXT: "OpenOffice.org -- A free alternative"
FADE TO BLACK.
I'd put ten bucks in for this ad. Just the articles ABOUT the ad and how it was financed would be great publicity.
(Oh, and I hereby release all the text above under the open content license, v1.0.)
BTW When was it proven to be O(n^2) to represent complex markup in HTML?
I can't say that I don't give a fuck. I've just run out of fuck to give.
And this time it would be very simple. Once the XML document standard has been settled, the US government needs to mandate that any wordprocessing software used by the government must use the XML open starndard, no exceptions. Give the industry one year from the adoption of the the standard to implement it in their software. After which, any document processing software which does not conform is automatically excluded from any consideration by the government. No one is forced to open up their proprietary systems. It's their choice. Choice is good, even for arrogant companies like Microsoft.
-- Will program for bandwidth
So if these guys are all for standards...why don't they adopt the XML format used by KOffice? They'd probably want to extend it somewhat, but KOffice seems to Work Here and Now.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
If MS is going to use its own markup language that isn't standard XML, it's no longer XML-- it's something else. They are already committed to using XML in their products-- everything from IE to SQL Server. If they want to pull XML from Office, they can probably do so, but they might have some more massaging to do to make Office 11 compatible with some of their prods.
It never ceases to amaze me how tenaciously they are at trying to hold on to their way of doing things, as opposed to following someone else's way. But then again, Office is one of the sacred (cash) cows of MS.
Always look on the briight side of life! (whistle, whistle)
XML can do alot of things, but when you're just using it to store formatting information, it's not much more than a glorfied HTML. As a previous poster said, anything you'll do with an XML document format you can do faster and smaller with a binary format. There's nothing inherently bad about binary files - you just need a well-defined spec to read them. The same is true of an XML document. An open office document standard is good. It being XML is okay. It being something else, like RTF, would be okay too.
M$ is a big player in XML. Now they now have to either continue the pro-XML strategy and acknowledge that XML will commoditize their precious proprietary files (hastening the decay of the M$ monopoly), or "embrace and extend" the XML used by Office into something that looks like XML but isn't.
As a desperation ploy, they could use XML file formats, leaving the tags in plain text but encrypting the data. Any competetive products trying to work with the file would be face the wrath of DMCA.
Microsoft XML Architect and W3C XML Standard Co-creator Jeal Paoli announce XML integration with "Office 11" on November 14th...
Open Source community (in no doubt lead/prodded/cajoled/wrangled by Sun's Scott McNealy) tries to upstage W3C's work on XML by producing their own standard on November 20th.
Can you say "wanna-be"?
Also, I think the "editors" of /. should be lynched for turning an honest response from Microsoft into a "we-don't-play-that-no-mo" response. Microsost NEVER said that they weren't going to work within that working-group or not. CowboyNeal et. al. are just a bunch of freakin' gits who love to "sucker-punch" anyone they can.
I think /. should change their background color to "yellow" - because this STINKS of "Yellow Journalism"
ScottKin - looking for CowboyNeal so I can PUMMEL him into consciousness.
I don't give a rat's behind about "karma" here or anywhere else. Don't like what I have to say here? Deal with it!
{insert proprietary data in closed format}
if I say microsoft is evil 10000 times a day, maybe it will make them put their code under the gpl.
This whole bashing thing is getting really tired.
Its like my little kid with a chunk of cookie. He's so focused on the cookie he doesn't realize the rest of the world has passed him by and graduated to popsicles.
Funny. I just made a "hello world" document using Word 2000 and it was 19 KB. ;-)
I don't doubt it. But on FAT32, technically, a 19KB document takes up the same amount of space as a 1-byte document: 32KB (The size of a cluster on a FAT32 filesystem. Don't know about NTFS, though.)
Almost the same thing is true on most Linux machines, which run ext2. On ext2, the inode size ("inode" is to ext2 as "cluster" is to FATxx) 4KB. That means that every file, unless it contains 0 bytes of data, takes 4KB in the filesystem.
The only place where small files' size makes a difference is in archives, or when downloading. (As anybody on a dial-up connection can tell you.)
What's this Submit thingy do?
You dream about Microsoft? That's really scarry, you might want to see a professional.
I know OOo has compression, not sure about Staroffice.
How many times is this joke going to be posted and modd'ed +5 funny? Yes, we get it! HA!
Forget the whales - save the babies.
Abusing your monopolistic position IS.
If I came up with some supercool new product, patented it, and formed a new company to manufacture and sell it, guess what? I'd have a monopoly on that product.
Get your facts straight. I'm as opposed to some of MS's shenanigans as anyone here, but you're spreading FUD.
I have been using OpenOffice on a consistent basis for the past three months, and I have to say that I like it quite a bit. I know, there are some things to be worked out on version 1.0.1, but I just enjoy being able to create documents without having to worry whether I will be able to send them to others and them not be able to read them in MS Office. Plus, I have both Linux and Win machines, and I can move files between them without having to worry about trying to open them up on the receiving machine.
In the bigger scheme of things, this could be interpreted as another Sun vs. Microsoft battle. MS has been trying to stick it to Sun and Java over Web Services, and this could be Sun's way of responding. Boys, boys, can't you learn to play nice together? The truth is, OASIS has lent OpenOffice some credibility by talking about XML file formats and trying to create a standard using OOo as an example.
Always look on the briight side of life! (whistle, whistle)
there's a reason people are still using .doc and .pdf instead of HTML,
HTML and PDF serve different purposes. HTML is a mere markup language that leaves interpretation to user agents, while PDF is a format with exact layout and font information. Even in combination with CSS HTML is not equal to PDF in that regard (and not supposed to).
Yea, they will map .xml to m$ word and whenever you click on one instead of parsing it to see what app it is m$ word will just say your document is corrupted.
Why not? Its what they did with Java and got no punishment for it. Its what they do with HTML...
First of all, MicroSoft is moving to an XML-based format; the coredump^W.doc format is nearly as much of a pain for them as it is for everybody else. They're just moving to an XML-based format they're developing in-house.
Of course, XML itself isn't all that different from binary; it offers the ability to structure your data (if you want), and it provides document-relative pointers, and requires a bit more encoding of some things, but it doesn't really require that your format be comprehensible to anybody else.
Deriving the format from HTML would probably be a mistake, because HTML contains a lot of historical artifacts and it also attempts to avoid many of the things you'd actually want in a non-web document format.
At first it looks like you know what you're talking about, but later on you disprove that. Still, it is true that merely moving a document format to XML doesn't guarantee any sort of compatibility. You can express the most obscure and proprietary document format in XML and not make it any less impenetrable. What is really needed is a standardized feature set of a word processing document and a set of tags to express its structure. This would however restrict compliant word processors to a common feature set and remove the lucrative opportunity for differentiation.
So, in addition to defining a lowest common denominator feature set, you would also have to standardize on an extension mechanism that would allow vendors to add new features to their products and allow for saving of these features into the document without breaking lowest common denominator compatibility with other applications. XML is particularly good at this sort of thing, because of the endless level of nesting it allows. Take something like smart tags or annotations, for example. You could save such information into the document as a set of new child elements of the text in question. Word processors that don't know anything about smart tags or annotations wouldn't understand the new element tags and would ignore them.
This is a relatively trivial example of mere text attributes, but more complex document features could affect the structure and integrity of the document itself. Take for example text frame linking--if a vendor added a particular mechanism for linking individual text frames together, a word processor that didn't understand those tags might parse and present the text in the wrong order. That's why a standardized feature extension mechanism would also have to address the issue of graceful failure, so that applications that don't understand some tags can display the document with reduced sophistication but still in valid fashion.
Visual formatting is only one use for XML. It's probably more useful for data storage (and mining.).
It takes a load of complexity out of the file format, and lets you break down your data in a consistent, data-oriented fashion. This makes sorting a snap.
For example, one of my projects uses XML to hold the entire structure of logic networks.
What's this Submit thingy do?
When a company creates a product and the product's files are saved in whatever format - what are the standards/rules/guidlines/whatever regarding the extension.
.XXX extension a trademark? patentable?
.doc? .psd pdf .wrd what?
.[file extension of their choosing here] whenever they make a program that saves a file?
Is the
Is it illegal for any program to save its documents with
Does microsoft or any other company for that matter *own*
how is this controlled - or what has the industry agreed upon??
Ignore all of the obvious issues about the value of the .DOC monopoly. Consider instead that the name of the working group is the same as the name of a product that competes with yours and that the working group has pretty much decided that the file format will be based upon the file format of that competitor.
In other words, Microsoft would be participating in the canonization of the file format of not only a competing product but an open source competing product. Can you really blame them from seeing that as a no-win situation?
I wish the standardizers and coders the best of luck and I would love to see them succeed. But I'm sure none of them are naive enough to have expected Microsoft to participate. Only the scandal-hungry hounds at CNet and Slashdot consider this news.
Open office doesn't have much of a chance unless they somehow can combat the M$ wallet.
Netscape got screwed because of exculsive contracts that blocked it from being preloaded on most PCs.
Corel got screwed because if failed to adopt Windows fast enough, then was blocked as Netscape was, and then was given the death blow when Microsoft flooded the market with "illegal" WWF(world wide fullfilment) copies of Office 97. Who was going to buy WordPerfect when you could get a copy of Office 97 with no manual for $35?
Office is now 90 market share. What does any other product offer that M$ doesn't? And what makes it worth the cost of changing platforms? Most everyone allready HAS office. What is the point?
Slashdot, home of supporters of free software, free music, and free speech.Except for Moderators that disagree with you.
Give me a break. When was the last time that Microsoft resisted a format because it was modestly less space and processor efficient than the old format? My guess, given the size of current MS documents and their programs' efficiency, is that it was approximately the 12th of never. And if size is really a concern, it should be easy to use a standard compression algorithm, like gzip or bzip2, to reduce their size. AFAIK, XML takes up a fair bit of disk space because of the tags but it compresses very well.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
I don't know...supposedly (big if) they have to hand over their proprietary file formats anyway. But really...if the only way for them to hang on to their dominance with office is an anticompetitive technique, they deserve to fail. Maybe if they attempted to make the product simply better than the rest they'd be fine. Quite frankly, I use excel because it's a great spreadsheet. So I think there are other roadblocks other than just good converters. Though admittedly their market share would decline somewhat with better converters.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
I think you meant to say:
<data>ÐÏà±áaksljdflkaj31948lksadjfmn232</data&g t;
======================================
Writers get in shape by pumping irony.
XML buys you a few things:
* it can build on other XML standards (e.g. there's an XML spec for address books).
* you don't have to worry about byte ordering endianess or the represent of chars/ints
* XML can be converted to other document types (e.g. text, another XML format, RTF, PDF) via XSLT
* XML has a schema which allows validation
* there are several XML based tools out there.
* because it's human readable, it's easy to make quick and dirty manual patches or modifications if they are needed.
RTF and PDF are both good binary formats that have a lot of support from tools, but they lack the other advantages of XML. Of course, it should be possible to create a binary version of XML that had all these properties (except human readability), but it'd take years for it to reach the maturity and the XML library code base that XML has and there's no guarantee that it'll be accepted by industry.
XML is more than a glorified HTML. It's a standard format that we've all agreed upon, much like english. Languages like Loglan are a lot better than english, but it doesn't matter. No-one uses Loglan, so there's no use for Loglan outside the small circle of Loglan enthusiasts.
Ok, first off I'm no fan of XML, to put it lightly. Actually I hate it for the ridiculous misconception that it is. However, this OASIS thing isn't a bad idea, especially if it help move away from closed formats.
Also, as much as I dislike XML, your statements are ridiculous:
Everyone should just stop reading your post here and dismiss it for tripe. Either you're just trolling, or you have never even used something similar. As another poster has noted, even the simplest MS Word document is of ridiculous size. Try making a multi-hundred-page document and see how many megs this takes up (if MS Word will even handle it; it chokes quite quickly as your pagecount rises).
Markup is basically no more than the raw data, with negligible constant overhead and fractional size complexity based on total document length. This is going from a typical LaTeX document. HTML can be a lot of markup, depending on your content-to-formatting ratio; and "common" for HTML these days is not mostly content-oriented, as word processed documents are. This article is discussing the former, not the latter.
This might be a valid concern. Or it might be if Microsoft didn't have a huge defense patent portfolio.
What? Doing things like tables takes an exponential time complexity resulting in higher document mass? Please point us to this wonderful "proof", as it seems to have found some interesting bends in... reality.
However, let's assume for a moment you knew what you were talking about, and that there's an exponential size complexity, and that by HTML you mean XML, since HTML is not a relevant part of this discussion in the first place. (Or was this just a straw man to begin with? I thought so.) Increasing size by a factor of n^2 based on complexity of formatting does not make much sense; for one it assumes certain types of formatting have a well-defined complexity (they don't), and it also assumes the writers of the DTD don't know what they're doing (they do).
For instance, you can define setting the font to have constant overhead when applying it to any given length of text. (LaTeX, or even HTML, both do this.) Similarly, you can define setting the position and size of a block of text to have a constant overhead for a piece of text. The ability to set the font and place blocks of text on a page lets you do just about anything (tables, frames, columns, paragraphs, etc.). Given that there is a constant size complexity for each piece of text, there is therefore, worst case, a linear size complexity for formatting your whole document (some multiplier times n where n is the number of "pieces" of text).
Even in cases like HTML, where you can have a lot of markup if you do tons of formatting, the cost in terms of size of formatting does not increase based on the size of the content. That is, "set the font to XYZ" does not change in size if your content is one character, or ten characters, or a million.
Oh, sure, it's economical for them. Just not for the reasons you gave above.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
I don't get the open source movement in cases like this:
1. Make something open source
2. Get millions of users and developers
3. ????
4. Still flat broke
It isn't about money, but creating better systems requires concerted efforts by at least some. They need to be compensated on some level. Karma just doesn't go that far these days.
It's no secret that the /. crowd is microsoft-hating all day long (and me too), but flat out lying or manipulation is still not ok - I thought we left that for Bill to do.
.Doc Replacement Panel
/.ers aren't hackers (by the definiton of RMS, anyway)) and such have a critical eye, and won't blindly swallow stuff without actually questioning (unless RMS ways so of course :).
Microsoft Just Says No to
And from the article:
Microsoft, [snip], has decided to take a "wait and see" approach with the working group, said Simon Marks, product manager for Office. Microsoft is an OASIS member and can join the working group at a future date, he said.
"If this turns out to be something that we feel (is necessary) for customers, we can join, but currently we'll just wait and see," he said.
I also believe this more or less means no, but it doesn't say so! I like to think hackers (I guess most
Because the major corporate customers know that proprietary products screw consumers in the long and possibly short run.
I happen to agree with your sentiment that major corporate customers *should* know that proprietary products screw them, but the evidence suggests that they don't know this, they don't care, or they perceive the effort to change too high.
Care to name a "major corporation" who have no information locked into any proprietary file formats? That means no MS Office, WordPerfect, Photoshop, Lotus Notes, PeopleSoft, AutoCAD, etc. etc. etc. I'd wager you can't name one big company that stores even half of its documents in formats that aren't held hostage by a software vendor.
Is this stupid? I think so, especially as the pattern is to get your organization so completely dependant on the vendors' software. Should the vendor decide that their profits aren't high enough, they can stop supporting your product (and therefore your documents), or charge extra to support you. Worse, if the company goes under you will have *no* way to update your system.
Proprietary formats are guaranteed to be an eventual dead-end. It's just that the end is so far beyond all corporations' short-sighted vision that it just doesn't matter to them.
Look at the tomato! Isn't it sad? He can't dance! Poor tomato!
Actually, it'd be more like this:
d jfmn232.....[/for matting]
[xml]
[document type="ms-word"]
[formatting>aksljdflkaj31948lksa
[segment]Hello World[/segment]
[segment]This is a test[/segment]
[/document]
[/xml]
You'd be able to read the text of the document (so it appears open), *but* since you don't know the formatting, you can't write an OpenOffice import based on the XML since the formatting is proprietary.
* Lack of features -- there's a reason people are still using .doc and .pdf instead of HTML, and giving HTML a fancier name for the new millenium isn't going to change it. Anything tougher than bold, italics, and tables has been proven to be an O(n^2) representation in HTML and has been neglected because nobody wants to download a meg of webpage.
That's the most clueless paragraph I've read on slashdot today, and that's quite an accomplishment! O(n^2) representation in HTML? ROTFLMAO!
I was under the impression that a doc encoded in XML would do more than just format the text. Couldn't they also mark up content specifiers like email addresses, proper nouns, misspelled (sp?) words, or things like that? It seems to me that using XML in word docs would make them a lot more usfull to other applications.
I think MS tried to do this with smart-tags, but I havn't seen anyone use them. I turn them off whenever they activate. Perhaps if other applications could read the tags, they would be more widely used...
The only thing microsoft picked up on is that not being a monopoly would suck.
Microsoft owns .doc, however XML is still a wildcard;
So why are they using it in most of their newer file formats? Why is it an integral part of .NET? Why are is it an the basis of they web services ( SOAP, etc.) protocols?
Anything tougher than bold, italics, and tables has been proven to be an O(n^2) representation in HTML
I'm speechless...
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
Dyslexia helped me read this as Abortext, and so my first reaction was that regardless of what M$ decided to do, the project was probably doomed anyway.
"Abortext- we loose the information, so you don't have to!"
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Fact: Microsoft is dying
We should all keep in mind this simple truth: Microsoft is dying.
You don't need to be Kreskin to predict Microsoft's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Microsoft faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Microsoft because Microsoft is dying. Things are looking very bad for Microsoft. As many of us are already aware, Microsoft continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Famed Microsoft persona Bill Gates states that there are 7000 new Windows users every nanosecond. How many new users of FreeBSD is there? Let's see. The number of Microsoft versus FreeBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 7000 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 FreeBSD users. OpenBSD posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of FreeBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of OpenBSD. A recent article put Apple at about 80 percent of the OS market in the graphics business. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 OpenBSD users. This is consistent with the number of Apple Computer Usenet posts. Due to the troubles of Microsoft's state of security, abysmal adoption of WinME and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by Walnut Creek. Now Walnut Creek is also dead,its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that Microsoft has steadily declined in market share. Microsoft is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Microsoft is to survive at all it will be among OS hobbyists, dabblers, and dilettantes. Microsoft continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Microsoft is dead
Fact: Microsoft is dying
Trolling is a art,
I tend to like the analogy that the entire PC world is like the auto industry...... manufacturers make cars with parts that are largely unswappable, yet they all (mostly) take the same general gas, oil, drive on common roads, and such.
MS does thier best to make thier car only work on MS roads, and no other cars are allowed.
Par for the course.
Adobe Photoshop has a .asp file that holds color imformation. When I was doing tech support for them we used to get calls all the time from Active Server Page developers that there asp scripts opened in Photoshop after install.
Just an example.
Str8Dog
using System.Darkside; public
If Microsoft does implement all features into its Office 11 XML format, then you'll see things like VBScript and VBA.
Word Macro viruses can already modify external files, and the problem will, as you mentioned, be limited to unprotected clients.
I expect there will be a new, competitively important question: Will applications like OpenOffice and AbiWord solve the security issues by implementing a setting deep in configuration dialogs, will they solve the issues by disabling the problematic features, or will they find a way to put security and convenience on the same side of the coin?
What's this Submit thingy do?
You tool! OF course there decisions are strictly economic, they have a monopoly to maintain.
So then your 'technical eye' is lazy and has a cataract. Your arguments aren't technical at all, but as you stated economics.
Now go run and play in traffic you lazy ewe.
Who let Micros**t into Oasis in the first place? I wonder if they have veto power over any new standards by this clueless group?
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
Here's my opinion on the subject - and I'm a certified libertarian too. blah blah blah blah who gives a shit boring blah blah bla bla bla drooone big fucking deal.
Please, quote me on that. My name is Bruce Perens.
So maybe McAfee or Symantec or someone like that, slipped a few bucks into Microsoft's pocket to ask 'em to oppose the new format. ;-)
(I love coming up with this crazy shit.)
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
There is alot of interoperability and software that uses Word and Office automation so it's not going to kill it.
However, MS definitely isn't going to want to lose any market share to the home/student market who have no need for such things.
I was just trying to think what people would say if MS had participated on the panel, and I think it would be "sabatoge." If MS did indeed participate on the panel they would have a chance to undermind the standard that was produced as well as get earlier info about the developing standard to try and circumvent it sooner.
I don't think MS would do this, but I think that there are worse things MS could have done than simply not participate.
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
If my name was William H Gates III, I wouldn't even SUPPORT the new format unless they twisted my arm (and then I'd implement the buggiest, shoddiest parser you'd ever seen for it). If MS Office doesn't support a format, it doesn't exist. Simple as that.
Joe Consumer won't ever know it existed, and my megacorp can continue plodding its way to world hegemony, or Wherever It Wants To Go Today(tm).
Because XML is highly compressible, use of XML does not necessarily increase file size. The Gnome apps that use XML data formats store it compressed as gzip; I just took a typical small Excel spreadsheet, which takes 20.5 kbytes in Excel format, and saved it in the Gnumeric XML-based format: it's 3K. Uncompressed, it's 37K, but that doesn't matter, as the uncompressed format is never kept either in disk or in memory all at one time.
Your logic astounds me. Because they don't call it "XML", it must not be "straight-up XML". Do you know anything about XML? There are a ton of DTD/Schema standards out there that describe a particular layout of XML, but they are all well-formed XML. XDocs will be no different. It is simply a name they have given a schema.
I'm getting sick of seeing these type of posts from people who obviously know nothing about XML. Please try harder next time.
Forget the whales - save the babies.
Microsoft won the war. I don't like it, however I've come to cope with it.
Mind you if I had a billion dollars or so, I'd love to put a lot of it into OpenOffice development and actually make OpenOffice so good that there would no reason to buy from Microsoft. I don't think that will be happening soon though.
I think it's hilarious. No other software company in the world could get away with breaking their standard file format's compatibility with older versions of their software with every other version. And BTW, what makes a big XML document with lots of crazy headers better then, say, rtf? (my format of choice). Can someone explain why the universally available and compatible rtf format is not adopted as the document standard? (And I'm not talking about microsoft's cash hunger, I'm talking about other apps that are free i.e. OpenOffice. It supports rtf, but whats up with the "Open Office document format"?)
The format can be whatever, that is not the big deal. The real problem in interoperability are the layout algorithms, which should be bit-to-bit identical to provide real interoperativity. Now, if I take a word document, I can use it with OpenOffice. Just one or two figures jump to a wrong place every now and then. Unfortunately, this seems to user as a big problem, even though the same problem exists, even though to a smaller extend, in between different versions of Microsoft's Office products. For example, you may be surprised if you have your powerpoint presentation displayed in a meeting with a different version than what you had written it with. I have seen disfuntionality and annoying differencies in layout there. The real solution is to standardize both on the file format and the layout algorithms, down to last bit (with no floating point arithmetics). This sounds ugly, but that's how it must be done.
This is a great idea. Something that Open Source software in general has needed for a long time. Put me in $10 when you get the corporate sponser :)
The Anti-Blog
I have personally saved thousands by using Open Source software. Ditto for my employer. And as Benjamin Franklin pointed out, 'A penny saved is a penny earned.' Furthermore there are companies making money on Linux now, and as our share of the market continues to grow, those opportunities will multiply. Our marketshare will grow by prying the .doc stranglehold from the throat of the consumer. And once the advantages of open formats are realized then Microsoft will have to follow our lead and compete by innovating.
I'm worried that this will become like Phillips and CD's with copy protection.
Phillips should be saying that any copyrighted cd is *NOT* a CD, and can't be called CD.
How would the standards committee be able to say that *every* document created by Word/AbiWord/[Star|Open]Office conforms? And could they pull the product? Highly unlikely.
www.christopherlewis.com
as digitaly signed documents are coming, there comes a question like "should i sign a document in proprietary format if i dont know exactly what the specs include" ? With XML i know or can find. This is not only about marketshare...
I have been involved with 2 "from Office" migrations, one from MS Office to Star Office, another to OpenOffice.org. The first move involved showing two secretaries, 6 library workers, one tech, and an admin Star Office. Since they were born this century and have been introduced to desktop computing, learning how to click different looking buttons was not hard for them and navigate run-of-the-mill menus. It took less then a day to "train" them. The second move was for a small office of about 6 people to OpenOffice.org. It was likewise painless and fast.
I understand that each company will have the trademark little old lady that is almost unable to learn new tricks, or the gung-ho MS fan that will whine all the way through, but that really shouldn't be a major issue to a seasoned IT pro - just business as usual. The "high training cost and time" to move to OOo is just FUD.
It would be much smarter of Microsoft to participate; then they can obfuscate and delay the new standard. Their refusal to participate makes me suspect that perhaps they beleive they have some patents that might apply, and don't want to get accused of acting like Rambus when they spring the patents on the committee to try to shut down the new standard.
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
I have been using Office 11 beta for about 3 weeks now. I also have been using the beta SDK for WordXML documents. It is completely plain text and very readable.
Please get your facts straight before flaming!
------ This has been provided as a public service! ------
We all know that the BS you hear MS spewing about wanting a healthy competitive market is non-sense. Quite frankly, they don't want any competition at all, nor do they even want their competitors to be able to compete. They want to lock people into using MS Office because they need it to use .doc files.
Every time MS has been faced with an opportunity to promote a uniform standard between different OS' and different word-processors, they've balked. Why? Because this would allow people to freely and easily switch from MS Windows and MS Office to Linux and OpenOffice, or Mac and OpenOffice, or BeOS and whatever.
Just goes to prove my point that MS is really like a drug dealer, except they're not selling drugs, they're adding them to their products: they work hard to create dependencies on MS Office and MS Windows (i.e., not supporting standards, introducing changes in the doc format to prevent others from developing interoperability).
Any time you here a company talking about how they want alot of competition and want what's best for the consumer, you can rest assured they're full of shit. All that any company wants is to maximize profits using any legal means, and any illegal one's they can get away with. Sure, there might be a few exceptions like RedHat, but those are far and few between.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Word Perfect used to have a >90% hold on the marketplace. Now no one gives a damn about them (which is a shame as WP was once the best wordprocessor out there).
Word may have a stranglehold on the marketplace right now, but nothing lasts forever. Nothing.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
The entired concept of a 'file extension' is entirely MS-centric anyway, a legacy of the DOS world.
There is this concept called "MIME" that the rest of the Internet uses for specifying what the content of a file mean when exchanging that content with other systems
You could name a file july.2002.tax.receipts and it wouldnt matter.
Eg, 'file extensions' are non standard anway, and there is no 'industry' concept of what means which. (unless of course you consider MS to be the entire industry, which is certainly one of their goals)
Whenever they gang up against a company, buy stock in the victim.
You know its time to buy RedHat stock when they gang up and create United Linux. You knew it was time to buy Sun stock (and dump Digital) when they ganged up to create OSF/1 (a dog if there ever was one). When the ACE consortium backed MIPS architecture, you knew it was time to buy Intel CPUs.
Someone could write free file filters for MS Office so people would be able to exchange the documents, or you could just tell people to download and install OpenOffice for free. Either way, it is bad for Microsoft and good for humanity.
That's a cool idea, but unfortunately it will never happen. Have a look at AdBusters. They've got a number of great ads ready to air, but no network will show them because they run against the commercial grain of the rest of the sponsors. Rest assured, the media giants do *not* want to waste all their hard work kissing Microsoft's ass just to throw it away for a few million worth of ad revenue.
My deviantArt site
Microsoft Office file formats are the lynchpin to their dominance of the computer software world.
I am amazed that so many people who should know better - all of the /.ers who claim to be clued in - believe this tripe. Let me enlighten everybody who has fallen for this line...
First, do any of you out there remember a software company named Claris? For those of you who don't, Claris was the software division of Apple, and was responsible for programs such as MacWrite, MacDraw, MacPaint, etc. Claris not only had proprietary file formats for all of its software, they had inside knowledge of every detail of the Mac - the OS, the hardware, everything. What happened to them?
MacWrite was killed off rather effectively by - you could see this coming, right? - Word Perfect and Microsoft Word.
MacDraw was buried completely by Adobe Illustrator.
MacPaint was annihilated by Adobe Photoshop.
The lesson here is simple. If Claris, which had access to every facet of their only target platform could not dominate the Mac software market with proprietary file formats and exclusive knowledge of the OS, no one can.
Microsoft Office will not be taken down because its file formats are open, or because a 'standard' format comes along. Office - and this applies to pretty much anything - will be beaten by something better.
And as an aside, MS Windows is the dominant OS out there because - and think on this for a bit - there was no alternative to Win95 at the time it was introduced. Where was Linux at? BeOS? I owned a Mac IIfx, and it cost three times as much as a PC at the time. No alternative there.
-rwxrwxrwx 1 mycomp user 24064 Nov 18 12:31 mkhresume-longform.doc
-rw-rw-r-- 1 mycomp user 8842 Nov 18 19:14 mkhresume-longform.sxw
Same document, the latter converted to Open Office format. Adapt or be left behind, Microsoft.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Funny. I just made a "hello world" document using Word 2000 and it was 19 KB
Funnier: I created a "Hello Word" document using Word 2002 and it was 20 KB. Shave off a letter, add a kilobyte.
In short (assuming they do not lie), MS has realised that its bad (for users) to lock DATA into proprietary file formats. Their idea is to enable XML-tags in Word files. This way, standard XML-tools should be able to extraxt TAGGED data, but not necessarily other data and especially not formatting.
Or, put trays of OpenOffice CD-ROMs at checkout counters everywhere for 99 cents.
No other software company in the world could get away with breaking their standard file format's compatibility with older versions of their software with every other version.
Um, actually, everyone does get away with it. You can't predict every change you're going to make to a file format.
Why don't you yell at Sid Meier for not having Civilization I open Civilization III saved games?
I thought that office 11 supports native XML for both Excell and Word.
How many hits does Slashdot get from Microsoft IPs?
---
IMHO, of course.
May the SOURCE be with you.
I really think this is the bleeding edge of the whole "embrace, extend, and extinguish" thing. The question that comes into my mind after reading your insightful post is this: Is MS a technology or an economy? ("...economically speaking they're doing the right thing.") Are they *both* a technology and an economy? Where is the line between the two? and what determines the dominant attitude? I honestly think that BillG is as passionate about his codebase as the Linux folks (such as myself) are. So why is his company always such the economic asshole? Can't they succeed some other way? Or do they just *think* they can't?
C|N>K
Now use OO which compresses automatically rather than manually compressing your excel sheets.
1. Create decent doc2html converter that works.
2. Build pluggable 'autotransformer' modules for all common mail servers which converts incoming/outgoing.mail attachments automatically.
3. Allow config of 'internal' and 'external' format policy to set how mail should be converted each way (incoming or outgoing).
4. Add 'format transforming HOWTO' to outgoing mails. Include intructions on where to download the autotransformer.
5. Make installation point-and-click.
Please get your facts straight before flaming!
Noone pretended to post a fact, and I don't think anyone (beside you, maybe) had the feeling they did. The statement is, that Microsoft is probably locking in their customers again, and a non-readable format sounds like a good way to do this. You say it's readable? Well, then they probably found some other way to lock people in. I just read that XML isn't actually the default. Sounds like a nice way to ensure it will not be used very much...
this is a threat if and ONLY if (and when) the file format is as good and the tools are better. The format really doesn't matter, but the tools MUST be worth the switch. For a lot of people (myself included), the OpenOffice suite has a way to go before it replaces MS office on my computer or in most organizations that care about my opinion.
The truth doesn't care what I think.
Or include a link to OO.org in every email you send in reply to a .doc attachment.
Help fight continental drift.
We all get along together like tornadoes and trailer parks.
One of the problems with WYSIWYG markup is that it is visual, everyone likes Word (or whatever) because they can make things Look Right. But this is also its biggest problem, as it removes the structural/semantic information. We've now trained a whole pile of people to believe that what they think looks good must (obviously) look good to anyone. (To see the validity of that, just look at what those attitudes have done to the web. "I like blinkies, so everyone must." Ewww.)
But now the document is non-portable, and in some sense digitally unusable. Hard to index, hard to grab bits of for the next time you need almost that same thing. Indeed, something like the oft vaunted "mail merge" in Scribe, LaTeX, XML are relatively simple (a shell script and sed) but they tend to be hard in WYSIWYG documents.
Why? Because semantic markup is necessarily domain-centric. A business letter doesn't have the same kind of content as an invoice. Even when they're part of the same communication.
Thats a good thing for indexing, cataloging, analyzing and all that.
Its also a good thing for those who need to produce a lot of documents that look a lot alike. Hence document templates (available in any decent word processor).
Even better, using XML allows a nice separation of powers. The person writing the business letter does not need to know what it will look like, and the person defining its look does not need to know its content. Since the writer is not concerned with the look, editing actually gets easier. For example, I often use LaTeX (also HTML and XML increasingly) and emacs and know them both relatively well (and I use both under both Windows and Unix) and when I need to switch to something WYSIWYGish, I tend to get very cranky. "What do you mean, you cant put every sentence on a line by itself?"
Now everyone with a grain of sense knows all this (so I apologize for repeating it). Or do they?
Microsoft does. XML based documents are going to be the future, they say. Oasis does (but then they're SGML oriented anyway).
But not everyone does. That secretary down the hall doesn't. And he's going to fight like hell having to do things in a true XML oriented way (show him an xml editor and wait for him to threaten to quit). (Why do you think SGML never caught on?) He doesn't care about saving work - he wants to get paid for his 40 hours. And his boss is going to hear him loud and clear since he sits right outside her door. Even though putting him into that XML re-education camp is very likely to save a whole pile of money in the long run, the noise and screams and the short run cost is going to make it very hard to push in any kind of organization.
Which means we might end up with an XML representation of that WYSIWYG text. This would be a real mess. There is a thing called the "Rainbow DTD" (a quick web search turned up no live copies of this). This was an SGML (it predated XML) markup that essentially represented WYSIWYG markup. So there were elements like "". Yech.
As a proof of concept, a while back, I cobbled together a script that would read this and guess as to the users "meaning" (we were dealing with a relatively small target domain)- it worked, but quite badly, to get it to work well would have taken expert system or statistical inference kinds of code. The idea was not supported by my boss, because it would have required iterations and feedback from the original authors to tune the translations. He said, "They like WYSIWYG, lets not bother them." It was clear that it would have worked though, and with tools like XSLT, it would not have been all that hard.
So now I wonder, are the OASIS folks going to do a "rainbow dtd" type thing? Perhaps at a slightly higher level of abstraction? Or will it be a metalanguage for document definition (hey, I thought that was what XML was). And the MS folks, what does their XML look like?
Cuz, one way or another, with XSLT and a bit of hackery, someone will find a way to translate one to the other. And back. The only question left is how hard it will be and how much semantic information will carry across.
That's true! Not even new versions of Word are reliable converters of older Word formats. Strange how people continue to abuse themselves this way, but you can't fool all the people all the time.
If they were to adopt a document format where other companies software could edit documents created by Word, there would be little reason to stay with Office.
There's little reason to stay with office as it is, except Fear, Uncertianty and Doubt based on ignorance. Because M$ makes it so difficult to work their goofey word processor and because they continue to say it's so easy, people assume that the rest of the world's word processors are imposible to use. Ha!
Has anyone else noticed that Word produced PDF's are a bitch to print? Recently, I've filled out forms from four Universities. All of the forms that had M$ Word as a generator sploded Ghost script's print routines for a Red Hat 7.3 install. Using Abobe's free beer reader for Linux fixed on of set, but another just did not work until I finally broke down, booted over to M$ and installed the Win98 reader. One set of fonts were listed under document properties, but other fonts were actually used for printing. Errors seemed to have something to do with the Dingbat (can't remember the name now) font set. Has M$ managed to make Portable Document Files non portable? If this is intentional, and that's very Microsoft, Adobe should be pissed.
Microsoft takes orders from no one. Because of this, they will be used by no one.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Hmmm. Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
You may get interested in YAML.
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Word and Excel files also compres readily. For example, my 89k Word .doc compressed to 20k with gzip -9. The excel format file could be 3k too.
In some cases, the XML creates a more verbose representation that is not as easily compressed. But the extra verbage could have certain purpose: extra tags for compatibility, hints, etc. ie it isn't wasted.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Everyone loves open standards except the 800-lb. gorilla. It's the same in every industry.
Look at the table on the bottom of this page for more insight. Basically, the beginning of Unicode text (for example, in a file or webform) has a string of unambigous prefix bytes that tell you which byte order and encoding to use. There's UTF-8 (like ASCII, one byte wide), USC-2 (UTF-16) big AND little endian (those are the 16-bit ones you are talking about), and USC-4 (UTF-32) big and little endian. The USC-4 are 4 bytes per char and are often used in Asian locales for ideographic text.
In windows NT 5.x, I suspect you can assume USC-2 LE all around.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
There's quite a difference between games and office software. For example, companies dont rely on games being cross-compatible to be able to communicate with each other, unless they have a very ineffecient method involving quake 3 chat for all their business memos.
(And, yes, I know where and why it doesnt work, but it had to be done at least this far.)
version="1.0">
/> /> <xsl:apply-templates /> )
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
<xsl:output method="text"/>
<xsl:template match="*">
<xsl:choose>
<xsl:when test="count(node()) = 0">
<xsl:value-of select="name()"
</xsl:when>
<xsl:otherwise>
( <xsl:value-of select="name()"
</xsl:otherwise>
</xsl:choose>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
The transformation in the other direction is left as the traditional exercise for the interested reader.
Lets say that Word Processor 1.0 doesn't support tables.
Lets say that Word Processor 2.0 does support tables.
Now, it's quite reasonable that Word Processor 1.0 will choke on the tables in a document that Word Processor 2.0 creates, isn't it?
.doc is a simple dump of the memory state,
False. The ".doc" format is definitely not simple. It's also not a raw dump of memory, it's objects that have been serialized into OLE structured storage, which you can think of an evil twin of the already evil FAT file system.
Probably one of the *least* robust file formats I know of
Yes, that's true.
And you can be sure that MS *will* support the well doumented open doc formt as an importer. Jo Public will see that Word is always able to read open doc formats, but other apps never seem to be able to read MS doc formats (and conclude MS must therefore be better). Open Office will have to be better if they are going to keep their users.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
The era of adding genuinely useful features to productivity software is long past. I defy you to find any company (including Microsoft) where more than 5% of the people use more than 5% of the features in MS-Office. Feature creep in that product is addressing a diminimus minority. Sure, you can do all kinds of clever stuff with VBA - who actually needs to? Very few people.
The one and only time in recent memory I have tangled with VBA was to borrow from a colleague a script which implements a basic feature that MS-Access (2000) is simply missing - save a table as CSV. That's right, it can't do it. It can put it on the clipboard, but as any non-techie who wangs data around using Excel will tell you, the world stops at row 65,535. Lame.
Why do people upgrade from MS-Office 97 to 2000 to XP? Not for features, for one of two reasons - (a) they get a new computer and the old version won't run, or far more commonly, (b) they start receiving too many .DOC files by email that their software won't read. MS not only has the sense to stick with the impenetrable binary format, but to make an incompatible change to the default save format each release to force the upgrade path. Forget XML - the .DOC is the lingua franca of non-techie document exchange. There is a 3-way tie for second place between .PPT, .XLS and those little winmail.dat calendar thingies from Outlook.
I use StarOffice 5.2 for day to day munging of MS-Office files, for which it is fine, and it has come a long way from earlier versions, but it still needs work in the one word processor feature that really matters - handling .DOC - nowadays it supports even fancy stuff like change tracking, fonts are mostly their though it suffers from more "layout creep" than exchanging files from one setup of MS-Word to the next (what a bunch of lameness, making layout depend on the print driver, Word's worst bug IMHO).
ISTR that MS was originally proposing to use XML in Office 2000 when it was first on the drawing board. Some PM pulled that piece of business suicide away right quick.
Sure Unix is not open source as we have come to know it.
But, the various Unix versions from HP, DEC, IBM, Unisys and others pretty much took over the true proprietary systems since the 70's primarily because customers were not tied to proprietary technology.
That same factor now disfavor Microsoft and all its effort to force consumers to remain tied to the highly overpriced and proprietary OS technology.
NexuSys - Linux support by the best
Microsoft shareholders would take notice if Microsoft were required to pay between $10 and $15 billion to AOL for precluding them from the browser market.
You think not?
Browser sold from Netscape and Microsoft for $35 a copy just before Microsoft illegally bundle IE so that everyone who used a Microsoft product was also forced to buy and use IE.
And, how many copies are out there since the first 95?
400,000,000 or so at $35 a pop?
That is 3-5 billion right there. Netscape was in the drivers seat just before the illegal acts began. And, at the same time Microsoft itself suggested they would not succeed without leveraging windows by bundling IE with it.
Of course, the idiots lie about it now. But, Gates even used the "B" word himself in threatening others in the industry.
Microsoft is just a bunch of liars.
If you believe them (and you can not) they do not know the difference between commingled code and an icon.
Now, how stupid can you be?
NexuSys - Linux support by the best
All microsoft said was that they were going to wait and see.
Here are a few things to read. I'm sure you can find more if you try....
Ripped from the headlines....
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,561973,00.as
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2002/Nov
Not news.
/.ers are responsible for the decision they do make.
They never were.
But
And, buying proprietary Microsoft technology is looking pretty dumb right about now.
Unix did take hold because a second and third source was available to corporate accounts to avoid a proprietary tie it. That same concept will benefit both Linux and truly open standards such as XML (the kind that permits other applications to read the data).
XML is of little value if it is just another proprietary structure.
In other words, if other applications can not read and utilize XML files, the form the data is in will not matter much.
NexuSys - Linux support by the best
Being XML is not where the value is.
If other applications can not read the data it could just as well be in French, German, Japanese or Italian.
The promise of XML is not the actual structure. The promise is that other applications will be able to read and understand the data and thereby use it.
So if you force your crapping software to be unusable you may get your wish.
NexuSys - Linux support by the best
Times are changing.
With the introduction of OpenOffice, StarOffice and now the movement behind XML file formats for data files, corporations will have a choice.
The dumb IT managers may continue to make bad decisions for their company and their company will pay because of it.
They do have the right to be stupid and waste their money. But, if their boss finds out they may loose their jobs.
NexuSys - Linux support by the best
.. and then to other news.
In a press statetement released to day, Bill Gates announced that he will not shoot himself in the foot regardless of the opposing rumors in the IT industry circles.
"There is a terrorist behind every bush"
Now, it's quite reasonable that Word Processor 1.0 will choke on the tables in a document that Word Processor 2.0 creates, isn't it?
That depends on how smart you were when designing the original format. At worst you could expect the tables to disapear or just look funny (i.e. not like tables). But you could have been smart and have formating features in the original format that version 2 could use to tell version 1 how this is supposed to look. This is of course not going to help version 1 when editing the tables, but at least it could display the document.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
Great! Now if anybody from slashdot lives in any of the states that are still suing Micro$oft, they can make file formats one of the main objects of redress. Force them to open all file formats forever (do it in one state and the whole world loves you). Maybe even force M$ to adopt open standards as defined by another organization (openoffice.org might be nice, ISO would be much slower :) on its monopolistic software.
Why not an open replacement to PS/PDF as well? Or would Adobe be fearful of open standards as well?
How about open quicktime (sörensen to be precise), WMA, MPEG, etc as well?
Don't go blind with M$ hating, they are not the only culprits in this after all.
This simplistic worship of competition as an ends in itself like some genie that will solve all problems is perhaps the most dangerous product of the American public's notorious complacency to have arisen up to this point.
The American way has traditionally been to advocate fair and managed competition as opposed to the icon of competition dumbed down to the point that it becomes a simple equation of might makes right.
If "Competition good" were indeed true then Microsoft would always be in the right because they're the biggest competitor. In my opinion, this simplistic equation is not only false, but it is dangerous and one of the greatest threats to the American way of life. Microsoft SHOULD be forced to play by rules and no doubt all Americans should be required by law to vote in every election but that's another story.
Funny. I just made a "hello world" document using Word 2000 and it was 19 KB. ;-)
Funny, I just used my Kenworth semi to run up to the store for a gallon of milk, and it burned $4 in diesel. On the other hand, my wife's car isn't going to fare so well hauling 80,000 pounds of furniture cross-country.
It's called "using the right tool for the job". In another window I have a 40-page, 60,000 character business requirements document open which contains at least 10 or 15 charts and diagrams, miscellaneous graphics, and a whole bunch of formatting, and the DOC file is only 280K. Seems reasonable to me.
(I just love the car/computer analogy tradition...)
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
This bad reporting and scaremongering is counter productive. MS are already moving their format to an XML based schema.. why do people believe this tripe..
Yeah, right.
It's inevitable. All free software has to be is good enough and it'll make massive inroads into MS's office and OS monopolies. XP and Office together retail for more that twice the price of a basic PC. The dam will burst when major OEMs start bundling non-MS OS and applications with their computers in order to boost their paper-thin margins. Naturally MS knows the value of being the default and gives massive discounts to OEMs, but even 10% of retail is a lot more than free.
I don't know about you guys, but OOo is more than good enough for my needs. So is Mozilla. So is Linux. Not even taking into account the traditional free software advantages (interoperability, stability, security, no spyware or excessive restrictions, etc.), it's a matter of time before free software becomes the standard.
It's simple economics: Money talks, bulls**t walks.
You specified an invalid host name...
</humour>
In another window I have a 40-page, 60,000 character business requirements document open which contains at least 10 or 15 charts and diagrams, miscellaneous graphics, and a whole bunch of formatting, and the DOC file is only 280K.
Fair enough. Now, where's the evidence than an XML formatted document would be more than 280K? Because that's what the original poster was complaining about and I was responding to.
60,000 characters.. hell, call it 60k. That leaves you with 220K for formatting and graphics and charts, etc. Seems like plenty of space to me, XML or not.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
The largest impetus to removing Word from corporate networks is the same as the largest reason for accepting group licencing.
To avoid embarrassment by raids by BSA/FAST.
Licences cause 80% of the aggravation and only 30% of the cost (in certain large networks) and Open Source licences remove that risk.
There, 100% compatibility problem solved and should be trivial to implement
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