Interview With Gary Edwards of OpenOffice.org

silentbob4 writes "Hot on the heels of yesterdays interview of Sun's Florian Reuter posted on Slashdot comes a two page interview with OpenOffice.org's Gary Edwards. In this installment, Gary discusses the importance of open document formats and hints to the release date of OpenOffice.org 2.0: 'No one knows for certain when OpenOffice.org 2.0 stable will be released, but Mad Penguin's bet is that the stable 2.0 release will come before any recently purchased cartons of milk expire in your refrigerator.'"

Comments

Fantastic

[MaestroSartori]

He's finally explained in clear terms why the MS-touted XML stuff in Office 2003 isn't useful to anyone else. I'd been idly wondering for a while, and other articles/interviews seem to take it for granted. Anyone else who's curious, the answer is on page 2:

...the problem is the well-known binary key in the Microsoft's XML header of every Microsoft XML document. That binary key holds a great deal of the information that we need about the layout definitions of the Microsoft XML file format. We can do a content-based transformation very well. Microsoft's content is in perfect XML file format. Their styles, though, are locked up in that binary key.

So yeah, MS have taken a completely transparent and useful XML format and munged evil hidden data into it. It can probably be reverse engineered, but still it manages to miss the entire point of having an XML data format in the first place :(

ETA 2005/10/20

[hexene]

A showstopper (#i55330#) has come up, and as a result there will be a third Release Candidate. So estimated time of arrival has gone from 13 October to the 20th.

Re:Why the fascination with XML?

[Bogtha]

Why has everyone suddenly gone googoo over XML? As all this interoperability nonsense shows, it often is far from the perfect solution.

Well no, it shows that if you try hard enough, you can undo the interoperability benefits of XML.

Yes, it's not perfect, but it solves a number of problems:

• Parsing into structure (XML)
• Escaping special characters (XML)
• Multilingual documents (XML)
• Character encoding issues (XML)
• Addressing parts of the document (XPath, xml:id)
• Transforming the document into other formats (XSLT)
• Web formatting (convert into HTML with XSLT on the client or server)
• Print presentation/PDF output (XSL:FO)
• Styling (CSS)
• Scripting (DOM)

...and lots more that I can't remember off the top of my head. The point is, a lot of things you would normally have to think about when creating a new format, you don't have to think about with XML because it's all done in a standard way, and there's a huge amount of software that you can reuse in your applications.

And, of sheer practical benefit, if you start what seems to be a "small, simple" format, you don't have to hack these things on afterwards when reality kicks in and your "small, simple" format balloons in complexity.

XML certainly isn't a silver bullet, but it's a hell of a lot better than creating a format by hand.