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Star/OpenOffice XML Format To Become ISO Standard?
Emil Brink writes "According to this entry in XML spec co-author Tim Bray's excellent blog, the European Commission has formally asked Sun to make the XML file format used in OpenOffice.org into a true ISO standard. Hopefully this will cut down on vendor lock-in and lure people from using Microsoft Office. "
Why would it lure people from Microsoft? People don't just use Office because they are forced into it. They use it because the alternatives suck. Yeah, Abiword is smaller and faster and takes up a little bit less RAM but it doesn't work as well as Word. Yeah, StarOffice/OO are open-source and free but they don't have the features that Word does.
People use MSFT because they are already locked in. Word does what they want it to do (and sometimes a lot more than they want it to). Just because Sun gets to set the standard in XML doesn't mean that Office users are going to give two shits... As long as their Word documents continue to open and they can continue to email DOC attachments to their email instead of just typing in the body of the email they are happy.
What will lure people away from Office is something that is somehow BETTER than Office. It will be free, it will be marketed, and it will be seven levels above Office in functionality. Honestly, as great as the OSS alternatives seem they just aren't Office/Word. You have to create a superior product and then market it. That's where OSS falls behind.
Everyone thinks that Firefox is so great. People weren't switching because they didn't know about it. Once IE vulnerabilities started showing up left and right they were alerted to the fact by mass media marketing. Sure, some people saw it and moved and even more didn't because they don't get their news from anything but the scrolling ticker below Survivor and The Apprentice...
I wonder if microsoft will support that format too. It would be childish not to, but I wouldn't be suprised if they would totally ignore it and continue using there own format in M$ Word
Hopefully this will cut down on vendor lock-in and lure people from using Microsoft Office.
Right, because all those office workers are going to think "Oh God, we're using non-standard XML?!"
Call me a pessimist, but having a non Microsoft standard isn't going to matter much, what with Microsoft being able to make its own standard.
Besides, how many times have you heard office workers say "Oh God, IE doesn't support CSS properly or render transparent PNGs?!"
What if the entire Universe were a chrooted environment with everything symlinked from the host?
There exists a technical committee at OASIS to make the OpenOffice format a standard (OASIS OpenOffice). How does this differ if it's a ISO standard as well?
It is just that the Microsoft format ist not really a standard. Face it the MSO formats are all undocumented, the Star division did several manyears of reverse engineering of the formats to achieve the results which exist now. And there is no alternative office product currently in existence than the ones from Microsoft which are able to handle the undocumented Microsoft formats better. OOO sometimes handles these formats even better than various office versions in between, which are prone to crash if the document has an error or some weird ole stream within the document cannot be found. The whole file format situation of MSO is a huge mess which Microsoft tries to get away from as well. (hence the move to a documenten but with patents plastered xml baseds office format) Btw. yes I know there exists an official specification to the old office formats, but face it they are nothing more than a nice fairytale contentwise.
Businesses don't care about interoperability.
Huh? I hear interoperability concerns cited as the number one reason that businesses still use Windows & MS Office. It has become standard practice in recent years for business documents (e.g. proposals, invoices, etc.) to be passed around as MS Word documents. People are nervous to move away from MS Word because they are concerned that they might not be able to open these documents in another system. They get worried about MS's FUD about OpenOffice not being able to open some huge percentage of MS documents.
Sure, your Fortune 50 companies may need some features that OO doesn't provide, but the number of office suite users in those companies is a small minority compared to those in SMEs.
An interesting point about OO's file format is that it is very conducive to being manipulated by external programs. And if it becomes ISO standardised, then that would provide some level of assurance that the format will be supported long term. This kind of thing can be important when it comes to building an information management system around the files.
This would be great! the EU *SHOULD* back this move by mandating that any Office Suite that is to be sold in the EU or used by any government within the EU MUST conform to that ISO specification.
That would EXCLUDE extensions, meaning, the format, if embrassed by Microsoft would have to be 100% ISO XML compliant - No embrace and extend for you! (Microsoft)
Well actually its as important what the dominant consumer does as the dominant vendor. If goverenments around the world want the standard, then they will use a standard compliant system. If that occurs, what MS does matters less. No leader can lead without followers.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
Your argument supports itself, but little else.
I will lure lots of people from Office, potentially. It's at least a step in the wrong direction toward bigger things.
Realistically, no big enterprise rollouts of Office are going to drop it in favor of OO.org just because of this, but those small mom'n'pop and small businesses out there that you conveniently ignore don't need Office. They mostly don't need even the bulk of OO.org's features really. They run Office because of lock-in and hopefully won't have to forever.
Those large businesses by the way probably love ISO standards. What if ISO standards dictate that any ISO 9001 certified company must maintain all its data in open formats - it's a stretch just now, but I see a lot of huge companies who love to put banners on their buildings bragging of being ISO 9001 certified.
This may have an influence enough that MS adds the ISO standard formats to Office, then OO.org really has no barriers to the majority of the Office market that doesn't need anything from Office but the file filters.
-N
I've nothing to say here...
If it's an ISO standard it won't do a damn bit of good until the Microsoft OS's and Microsoft mail system and Microsoft Applications all know to do the right thing. Whad'ya think the chances of Microsoft cooperating are?
Contrast this issue with that of the adoptation of IPV6. The ONLY way we will ever see IPV6 adoption is through a government mandate. IPV4 has way too much "inertia" for anything to supplant it. The same can be said of office applications. Try submitting your resume in anything but .txt or .doc (MS Word) format. NOBODY will be able to read it, believe me I tried sending mine in .pdf format and was told to "please send it in word". Once companies wishing to sell software to government are forced to support a common (and open) format then perhaps people will actually be able to choose the word processor they will use, otherwise they are locked in to what ever the dominate product (and it's proprietary format) are at the time.
Cheers,
_GP_
OOO sometimes handles these formats even better than various office versions in between
This is a very important point which doesn't get stressed enough when people complain about MS office compatability.
Even different version of MS Office has trouble reading MS Office documents consistently... or a more appropriate comparison... even the same version of MS Office, for MacOS v.s. Windows has trouble reading MS Office documents consistently.
People also tend to rely heavily on the idiosyncracies of their local configuration (printer metrics, fonts, paper size) to align and layout their documents. An awful lot of people who write documents lack basic wordprocessing skills, yet they attempt complex desktop publishing tasks using a wordprocessor(!)
When these documents are converted into a different wordprocessor, it is no wonder that OOO can't match the nonsense arbitrary document layout ... it can't possibly know the idosyncracies of Bob's Win2k machine with a Lexmark printer, although it can attempt to match the idosyncracies of Bob's wordprocessor.
When the OpenOffice file format becomes an ISO standard, Microsoft may be forced to support it, since organizations will likely put "ISO office document standard compliance" into their requirements.
Staroffice/OpenOffice really needs to have a better office document standard support.
The problem is: Microsoft Office formats are not a "standard"; they aren't even a "de-facto standard" or a "proprietary standard". They are simply whatever Microsoft's codebase happens to write into files this release. It's impossible to be fully compatible with that. Not even Microsoft manages to.
That's why an ISO standard office document format would be so important.
This is totally stupid. OO.org formats already support embedded images. The OO.org format is actually a tar.gz that can contain many files, including XML documents and PNG images.
If it is a vector image they can just use SVG, which is XML.
If it is a raster image they just use PNG and embed the dile
Do you really know that little about OO formats or is this a joke?
I've said it once and I'll say it again... what OpenOffice.org needs is a lean-mean OOo Reader Application! By that, I mean not having to download an 80mb installer with everything but the kitchen sink, but maybe a small 2mb or less reader that uses standard widgets (MFC, GTK, etc.) to make the app smaller and faster. I've gotten a friend interested in actually looking at OOo code to make a no-nonsense reader, but due to lack of time, he can't start any open source projects.
.sxw as an attachment to a friend. If he/she has broadband, point them to where to download the app. If not, maybe go over to their place and install it for them. If in another country, get them to download from someone who has broadband, snail mail them an installer CD with the reader and the full OOo app, or pester someone like IBM to include the said reader application with their desktops and laptops. See! I can already imagine the possibilities. If only I can program... I would be willing to test and help promote this stuff (preinstall on all PCs we sell).
A reader app is all we need! Email a
Making the OASIS Open Office XML format also an ISO standard would surely be nice and make it look better on paper to corporate and institutional IT managers. But for the EU, the current standardization process through OASIS should be good enough, since the question is whether controlling the format by two standards bodies at the same time will be technically feasible at all.
gopher://cramer.plaintext.cc http://cramer.plaintext.cc:70
I've tried to get peole to realize that in a few years, you won't be able to read many of the documents we are currently archiving because the office formats will have changed or the app that was used to create it might not be available to open it. I've tried to get people to save their read-only documents as PDFs and their "collaberative editing" documents as RTF, but this has proven to be difficult.
If I could go to my supervisors and point to an ISO standard format, I could more strongly argue for any "archivable" documents to be required to be stored in that format. From there it would me much easier to get people to save ALL their document that way.
I use OOo exclusively at work and love it. I am trying to get it installed as the default office suite on ALL new installations, with MS Office only installed on the desktops of those who can demonstrate a need (show me a document that won't work that you can't live without.) Right now OOo's documnet format is "just another word processing format". If it was an ISO standard, it'd have something strong to stand on for the "buzzword-only", tech-impaired descision-makers at work.
"terrorism" and "pedophilia" are the root passwords to the Constitution
I've done some hacking with OpenOffice XML files and I have to say, they're nothing if not logical ..... Verbose, naturally, but that's offset by the ZIP compression, and anyway storage is cheap nowadays. What's impressive is the way you can break everything down into separate files {for a neater format} or not {easier to create}, as you think fit, and it all still makes sense. Beautiful.
..... but not necessarily!
Migration of existing files from MS Office is still the big stumbling block to OpenOffice adoption, and one that needs to be addressed. It doesn't help that MS Office can't read or write OpenOffice.org files -- well, it wouldn't, would it? Putting in OpenOffice read-only compatibility would mean legitimising OpenOffice. Putting in read-write compatibility would mean suicide. So it seems as though OpenOffice will always be stuck playing catch-up over file formats
It's my understanding that the MS Office macro language can access and modify every feature of a document, and can also read and write text files. Surely, then, it should be possible to write a suite of macros that would allow you, using just a single licenced copy of MS Office, to read any Office document and re-export it in OpenOffice.org XML format?
Of course, in an ideal world, it would be illegal to lock up file specifications. Till then, we just have to run with the idea that if anything at all can read it, something else must be able to read it.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Well I don't know about everyone here, but I was suprised last night when I right clicked under windows on a sxw file in xp (with adobe acrobat 6.0 pro) installed and got a "convert to pdf" thing. And it worked perfectly. I would assume this didn't happen without some effort by someone at adobe...
I do it with no clicks -- Ctrl-2 for double-spaced, Ctrl-5 for 1.5 spaced, Ctrl-1 to go back to single spaced. This keyboard shortcut works in both MS Office and OpenOffice.org. Another option, as others have pointed out, is to customize your toolbars -- again, a solution that works for both products.