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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."
"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.
Straight-up ascii? That's what XML is (and RTF for the most part, except when you want to embed stuff).
And don't even get me started on RTF. Have you ever looked at that crap? I worked on an open source xsl:fo to RTF converter and I'd have to say that RTF is extrememly anoying to work with.
Microsoft has a RTF specification doc. but this is notoriously full of holes and ambiguities. There is a reason that RTF still works best with Office: they don't tell you how exactly to implement it.
It's tremedously hard to debug, ugly, verbose(more so than xml), hard to read. I hate RTF. I've had dreams when i kick it in the forehead and strangle it underwater. But that's just me.
Compare an XML document with a RTF document and you'll see what I mean.
Why, o why must the sky fall when I've learned to fly?
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.
Err..umm..UNIX is a proprietary OS. There's a very good reason Linux is referred to as a 'UNIX work-alike.'
Ye Gods, though, go take a look at a 'history of UNIXes' chart. You think Win95 vs 98 vs ME vs NT4 vs 2K vs XP is bad? You kids don't know how nice you have it now adays; even several years ago, at least it was starting to coalesce into BSD versus SVR4.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
I have to disagree.
File sharing IS one of the most important thing when you talk about CHANGE.
I work for a Linux company, and I lost the count about how many clients we loose because their sellers or customers would not have a 100% compatible word processor.
I can only imagine that their XML would be on a par with their HTML. That being said, FrontPage is cra*. "Hmmm, can we create a web page composed totally of span tags?? Yes!! Now, each one of these should have its own CLSID composed of no less than 80 digits and numerals. OOOH! Separate them with hyphens."
Seriously, their XML will most likely be along these lines:
A "creator" section that has the creator metadata,
A "Bodytext" section that contains the bodytext,
and some additional metadata that will only be of use to VB6 programmers working with an ODBC database.
The rest of the formatting and rendering information will be stored in poorly documented areas in HEX or binary encoding. Why? The system uses this type of information in Binary or Hex encoding.
Honestly, I have my suspicions that the new "XML based" formats are more a response to the decoding of their previous formats than anything else. MS can dance the Mighty "XML Standard" dance, all while providing a broken XML implementation. The truth is that people are already feeling "locked-in" and the XML stretegem is Microsoft's way of pretending to be more open.
~Hammy
Err..umm..UNIX is a proprietary OS.
Not really. There are many proprietary implementations of UNIX, but they abide by standards. This is why a "UNIX administrator" can feel comfortable on Solaris, IRIX, HPUX, Linux, BSD etc. It is also why software written under one UNIX is generally easy to get working on another UNIX.
Compared to Windows, UNIX is wide open. They are before my time, but I would guess that UNIX compares favorably to Mainframe OSes, too.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
"This isn't about Microsoft publishing specs to their .DOC format (which Kotar-Kotelly's Final Decree requires them to do) "
No it doesn't. It talks about protocols, not file formats.
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.
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!
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He's saying that it's nothing more than the structures in memory being saved to disk in binary form. This is not nearly as useful as XML, because it requires either having the source code or performing some extensive guessing to figure out what the structures actually represent when the program has loaded them into its process space.
LRC, the best-read libertarian site on the web
Microsoft doesn't have to do anything so sneaky. You see, Microsoft isn't really competing against OpenOffice, they are actually competing against old versions of their own software. Microsoft would love to make the XML format the default format in Office 11, but they know that if they do that their corporate users will freak out. Microsoft nearly had a revolt on their hands when they switched the Office formats in Office 97. All of a sudden people couldn't open the MS Office documents they received via email.
On the other hand, it did drive a lot of MS Office upgrades.
Funny thing is, I just wrote a program to convert those files from Word, and Excel to .txt and .tab files. Automated, in 50 lines of perl (sorry it took so many, I'm kinda' a Perl Newbie), what was a manual process, or a shaky (at best) and bloated (1000+ lines for full conversion of files from xls to tab) process with the APIs and VB/VBA. Funny how Perl, with the help of the SpreadSheet::ParseExcel module freed up two computers (they were used to process Excel Files under Windows with VB), the whole process was moved to the DB Server (PostgreSQL), and are flawlessly imported into a database now. I find it funny how a UNIX/Linux native language (Perl) can handle the transformation of Excel files better than Excel and VB can!
These VBScripts VBA modules and VB Programs that people claim are "needed" are anything BUT needed. I cut my workload down by about an 1/4 by simply getting rid of those scripts and programs. I also, in doing this, have been able to move more of my office to OOo. Our "Official Format" for acceptable documents is now Rich Text (rtf).
I am not alone in this type of move either, I have been consulted by a number of companies looking to get away from Excel and VB and Word, and MSSQL and Access, and even Oracle, so that they can be more productive and more interoperable at less cost. As to the "training costs so much!" argument, we've moved the secretary, the data entry clerk, the company president, the CEO and the 60+ year old sales guy to Mozilla (email), f-prot virus scanning software (for interoperability, and ease of license management), and OOo. It took me longer to train them on how to "Open, Select All, Replace, Save As" in Excel than it took me to train them to a point of near-proficiency with OOo! If your Admin knows his job, and makes sure to know the software inside and out, then your TCO drops dramatically!
.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.
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