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Microsoft Ends Era Of Closed File Formats
RzUpAnmsCwrds writes "According to an MSDN Channel 9 interview with an Office file-format developer, the next version of Microsoft Office (Office 12) will default to newly-developed XML file formats in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. The new formats will apparently include XML files along with other files (images, etc) inside of a Zip file. Microsoft will also be providing extensive documentation of the new format to the public through MSDN. The developer likewise announced that Microsoft would be releasing updates for Office 2000, XP, and 2003 to read and write the new formats when the new version of Office is released. If this interview is correct, it could mean the beginning of the end of Microsoft's proprietary file formats." Coverage at Beta News, Information Week, and the Washington Post.
Would'nt this approach cause MS to loose its lock-in ability based on file format?
Of course this assumes that lock-in was one of their goals with a propietary format
...now that they've all but killed off all of the commercial, vendor-supported competition.
And whatever happened to Office Integrated Rights Management, essentially a DRM for Office documents (New Office locks down documents) that (of course) requires a Windows server to administer, and only works with Microsoft Office? You don't think that they're just going to let that go by the wayside, do you?
And what about patents?
Sure, OpenOffice is great, but commercial enterprises will stick with commercial solutions for which there is support. And yes, this could be built for something like OpenOffice (and indeed exists for StarOffice), just as it has been for Red Hat, but I can't see this as anything more than a much belated, empty gesture on Microsoft's part. This sums it up: "Microsoft is doing this as a way to protect its presence on the desktop." Microsoft even dug up Charles Goldfarb, "co-inventor of the concept of markup languages", for its press release to say, "Making XML the default Office file format is, for me, the culmination of a 35-year dream," Charles F. Goldfarb, the inventor of the markup language technology, said in a statement released by Microsoft. Nice touch.
Also, "Microsoft Ends Era Of Closed File Formats" is a little overreaching, don't you think? They're looking for the biggest lock-in of all with the proprietary Windows Media formats. Microsoft wants to be everywhere there is any kind of media, and it's NOT open. Boy, I can't wait to live in a world where Microsoft controls and meters content and has everyone from the end consumer to cable, satellite, and telecom operators, movie and TV production houses, and everyone in between by the balls, which is exactly what will happen if they get their way. (And submission to SMPTE *hardly* means anything. Standards are standards AFTER they've been vetted by standards bodies, have had the patent searches and pools completed, etc., and have been, you know, actually approved. Not when they've been "submitted for consideration". Further, that gesture is nothing more than an attempt to get pinhead PHB-type managers and executives on board with Microsoft when their technical underlings are pulling for open standards like H.264 - then Microsoft can shoot back to the management, Hey, we're just as open as the MPEG family of standards! Look, we even submitted our codec to SMPTE! It's not our fault they take so long to approve things! Do you really want all that H-dot-whatever-gobbledeygook that your oddball IT guys are talking about? After all, that's what *Apple* uses. You don't want an Apple technology, do you? Go with us; you know Microsoft is the right choice for your 18-million-customer cable service! Utter bullshit. And ignores the fact that all of the codec improvements and tools will NOT be open; the SMPTE submission is nothing more than a thinly veiled attempt to put Windows Media everywhere as well by claiming to be "open" when they're anything but.)
It's interesting that they're doing this. I've been playing with OOo 2.0 beta lately, both under windows and *nix. I'm an Office user, but a home user, not a power user (I'm not a business dealing in several hundred page docs, I just do my homework). And I basically can't see any particular difference between the two packages. I have Office 2000, and so I'm using it, but I'd probably be perfectly comfortable using only OOo (2.0, I hate 1.1)
Anyway, my point is that MS is making it clear that they're not threatened by competing packages, and I'm not entirely sure why not. OOo could easily replace Office for many (I hesitate to say most) users, and if we switch to totally open formats, they'll be able to interoperate without any difficulties. I'm not trying to say that OOo is in a position to hurt Office...but I'm curious if it might be. MS doesn't seem to think so, and I'm really, really wondering what makes them so nonchalant.
You fucking troll, since when microsoft's binary document formats are documented, or fast?
Implementing a file format as binary data or even a simple SGML structure such as RTF means less overhead. Using XML you have to run an XML parser, and the file is more freeform. There are no set data structures, it is just a stream of text. With a binary format you can structure it in such a way that you can read a header in and know exactly where to seek in the file to get the information you need. With XML you are pretty much stuck reading sequentially and figuring things out as you go along. Sure, an XML parser library may make it easier, but behind the scenes it is still parsing that stream and processing each tag one at a time.
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
No they won't.
Watch the video - the entire file format is completely open.
He admitted that inside the ZIP they are currently storing the binary copy to make it easier to test and profile against the formats, but when Office 12 is released it'll just be the one XML, completely open format. He also made a point that they are going to have 'thousands' of examples on MSDN, along with very detailed documentation and whitepapers.
Now whether it's patented or not, I don't know. But this is a _VERY_ big step for Microsoft. It's going to make translating between this and OASIS (which OpenOffice2 and a lot of others are considering/implementing as their default) as simple as an XSLT transformation.
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For those who don't want to watch the video, the new format will supposedly offer a %75 improvement in file size. The old, binary format did not use any compression at all. Some of the other features include having the formatting information at the end of the file so that a half transmitted file still contains all the content.
In particular; consider "Microsoft may have patents and/or patent applications that are necessary for you to license in order to make, sell, or distribute software programs that read or write files that comply with the Microsoft specifications for the Office Schemas." taken from the same page...
What changed? How is that an "improvement" exactly?
Actually, that's not a bad point. What's to stop Microsoft from implanting things like VBScriptlets that are required for the document to render? That would put a real cramp in the competitors' ability to read the format, regardless of how "Open" it is.
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gzip and zip are completely different things. gzip compresses a stream (and does a much better job than compress, which it has replaced entirely. However, gzip is slowly being replazed by bzip2 nowadays), whereas zip is an archive format that can store individual (usually compressed) files. The huge advantage of zip over compressed tar archives comes from the fact that you have random access, i.e. can extract a single file from a potentially HUGE archive).
GIF had patent issues with the LZW-Algorithm it used. The patent has expired recently, but the GIF issue is completely unrelated to ZIP (ZIP uses LZ77).
About the patent issue: There are a dozen or so zip-related patents, but they're all highly specific and shouldn't stop anyone from using zip, or even writing a zip utility. See also Patents on data compression algorithms.
The interesting thing is that all this server based control and logging of DMR'd functions gives an enormous boost to the type of information available for international and corporate espionage. Through backdoors, security holes or escrow keys it was possible before to get only the documents themselves for the most part. Now it's possible to monitor who's collaborating with who, and see everyone in the distribution chain.
That much can be guessed even now during the vaporware stages. However, as more technical information becomes available it will be possible to guess whether these same functions can be used for more than monitoring and can actually be used to stifle or suppress dissent or specific individuals or groups.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
I agree with you in that binary formats can be faster, and I don't love XML-as-storage-format too much, but the case in point is *microsoft's* binary formats, which are little more than straight memory dumps, and UNDOCUMENTED, and SLOW.
A well-designed binary format makes much more sense than XML, in this I concur with you, but XML is better than current microsoft's doc formats in that it would be easier to figure out the inner workings of the format, and making struggle for compatibility a much less gory task.
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Fellow slashdotter Bill Dog
First of all, the entire MSDN library can easily be accessed online (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/), second an MSDN subscription doesn't involve any kind of NDA. The only times I've personally come across this was with pre-release stuff and with their limited beta programs and in those cases it's nothing that any other company doesn't do either.
Watch the video - the entire file format is completely open.
Honestly, I am not going to believe it until I see it.
Microsoft has lied before.
It's quite possible they don't intend to open their file formats at all, they just intend to make the Washington Post and its readers think they've opened their file formats. In the meantime, if Microsoft actually wanted to "end the era of closed file formats", all they'd have to do is, you know, actually comply with the letter of the antitrust decision currently handed down against them in the E.U. and the spirit of the toothless antitrust "settlement" currently in effect against them in the U.S.. Mysteriously, they haven't.
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I use Open Office exclusively and have for the past couple of years. Reading the files in certainly isn't a problem for me. The only files that are slow to load are the master document files, and that's because they link to dozens of other files.
The XML specification is being expanded (it might already be done) to allow binary formats. There are good reasons, though, why it's best to keep data files in straight XML text format. It eliminates the need to worry about machine architecture. Little endian or big endian, it maks no difference to you. The files are perfectly portable across platforms, which is increasingly important these days. XML files zip very nicely, making them almost as small as a corresponding binary file.
It is far easier to provide backwards compatability to earlier file formats when you are using XML than if you are using binary file formats. With XML, if it sees a tag it doesn't understand, the parser ignores it. If a binary file format loader sees stuff it doesn't understand, it bails out with an illegal file format error.
When you move to a new expanded file format with XML, you don't have to write a conversion utility. Since you are merely adding new tags, your program can read any of your old data just fine, then add the appropriate tags and new data. This saves a great deal of trouble for programers.
Machines are fast and cheap. People are slow and expensive. It is far better to have our computers do a little extra work on loading a text file and eliminate conversion utilities and complicated loading routines that a prone to bugs.
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Uhm ... try reading the license.
Looks kinda like a BSD license, don't it?
Yeah, especially the part that says "You are not licensed to sublicense or transfer your rights."
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