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OpenDocument Voted In By ISO
cduffy writes "OpenDocument has been voted in as ISO/IEC 26300, with no dissenting votes and a small number of abstentions. There are still several formalities to take place before final issuance. Now the question: Will OpenXML get the same treatment, despite its technical weaknesses? There's also coverage on Groklaw."
Although ODF is a bit nicer standard from a human point of view, and builds on existing standards, I hope OpenXML isn't accepted simply because having two standards doing the exact same thing is nonsense. They're much more similar than they are different at many levels.
ECMA are welcome to OpenXML, I don't think ISO should accept it.
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Well, I would agree with you about XSLT - but that's an XML technology, you realise? XSLT is actually one of the handy tools which you have access to. As an example, I was able to convert a large number of documents from HTML to OpenDocument using XSLT, and I would have had to write my own parsers etc. if the files on both sides weren't XML.
XML is handy because there's a lot of wheel reinvention that you just don't need to do. Also, it's not just a way of structuring data - comparison to JSON or YAML isn't really well-founded, they're not feature equivalent.
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[What] looked good in 1948, turned out bad (Tacoma bridge).
There's a huge difference between construction engineering and software engineering. In construction engineering, poorly understood physics and unforeseen weather patterns can create unpredictable situations and stresses. In software engineering, the rules of the system are predefined and well understood. While a lot of research goes into ways of doing specific tasks "better", the tradeoffs to each design are usually well understood.
The result is that standardized computer algorithms and formats are rarely incorrect. However, they do become obsolete in relatively short periods of time due to increases in computing power and informational storage/transmission requirements.
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As far as I know ISO only has standard organisations as members, which represent a country (ANSI for the United States). As I remember Microsoft took place in a workgroup, which only makes minor edits (IANASG). See http://www.iso.org/iso/en/aboutiso/isomembers/Memb erCountryList.MemberCountryList
The parties involved I believe will be in the knowledge that this standard ie free for all to implement. Kudos to ODF.
Actually if you think in terms of who's really interested in processing, archiving, and dissemenating large volumes of text to people all over the world, it's not hard to imagine that religious organizations would be at the top of the list. They have huge archives, and probably desire both interoperability and stability (no "format of the week" syndrome).
It's honestly tough to find many organizations that really are thinking past the next quarter or fiscal year; in most industries people are buying software and hardware for the here-and-now. If that document isn't accessible in 15 years, who cares? Outside of their mandated recordkeeping obligations (Sarbannes-Oxley, etc.) a lot of large commercial organizations probably wouldn't care if their documents were written with magic disappearing ink that rendered them unreadable in a few years or a decade. (To be fair, the majority of commercial text is probably nothing that you'd want to read in a decade -- memos, meeting minutes, reams of emails; most of it probably makes little sense outside its original context anyway.)
I think this attitude is shortsighted, but it's pervasive. Nobody wants to think about long-term storage, nobody wants to think about accessibility 10 or 20 or 100 years from now, except libraries, governments, and religious institutions. (And perhaps some of the very largest and longest-lived corporations.) So it makes sense that if you're designing a data format that you want to be around for a while, you'd want to bring on board the people who have the most interest in making it successful.
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If Microsoft implements OpenDocument (or anything like it) in Office 2007 it will make a lot of people very happy.
A blank Word document takes up eleven kilobytes, and a one page document takes up about forty. If this becomes the de facto standard for documents rather than the Word document format, then document file sizes will shrink significantly, and a lot of bandwidth and disk space on office networks will be saved as a result.
Experts from Boeing, bring them on.
Experts from the Society of Biblical Literature?? What have they got to do with a computer data formatting standard??
Isn't it obvious? Literary organizations have massive numbers of documents that need to be digitized and archived in perpetuity. As a result, they have a vested interest in using standardized formats that will be guaranteed to meet their needs for years to come. The Society of Biblical Literature is no different in these respects, especially as more and more fragments of apocryiphal and gnostic texts continue to be found.
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Well, for one, ODF is an ISO standard and is implemented in a bunch of different programs now, and OpenXML isn't. Lack of interoperability is a pretty crippling technical weakness, since we're talking about a document format.
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In software engineering, the rules of the system are predefined and well understood.
Until you give it to the users, or ask it to interact with another program, then it's a different story. The actions of users/other programs are often poorly understood and unforseen, and I'd argue they are analogous to the weather in this situation - they introduce inputs that the programmer would dismiss as impossible or garbage, and promptly crash that 'perfect' program. I'd agree there is a huge difference between contruction and software engineering, but which profession is more rigourous?
The result is that standardized computer algorithms and formats are rarely incorrect.
Algorithms and formats are often incorrect when they actually come to be used because of a misunderstood or misstated problem. Look at the language used to present these pages - HTML, hardly an elegant format. I suppose you could call it correct for some very sloppy values of correct, but really, given the purpose it's being used for (presentation of complex styled text) it is woefully inadequate, and also overengineered in some ways. This problem is inherent in any complex system used by many people, things simply can't be 'correct' for all uses, and often they're not even close. I wonder if that's why the phrase 'Broken as designed' originated in computer programming?
Lastly, formats usually become obsolete because companies want you to buy their new program, not for technical reasons (see Photoshop, Illustrator, Word etc etc). You're trying to factor the human out of programming, and thus ignoring all that is good and bad about it.
OpenXML is patent ridden and in a way that is problematic at best, compared to OpenDocument. ODF is also patent ridden, but unlike MS' offering, the patents have free licensing for conformant implementations and conformant means to the official stated spec, with the possibility of extensions becoming part thereof- unlike MS' offering which requires you to meet MS' shifting definition of what is/isn't compliant (i.e. it's not explicitly stated...) and you don't get to add improvements unless MS embraces and extends them themselves (i.e. if you've got extensions and MS doesn't approve of them, you're NOT at all compliant and can be sued for patent infringement...).
Technically, they're the same. This is the reason why people can't understand why MS is insistent on NOT supporting ODF as a format and trying to push OpenXML- unless they've got some ulterior motive. Now, they've little valid excuse for it.
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When comparisons between formats remark upon mixed content models compared to non-mixed asking "which would you rather transform" expecting the answer of "mixed" you know a lot of people throwing opinions around on this issue have never actually worked transforming XML.
If you're wanting a human readable document format you have XHTML. Use it and enjoy. If you're producing an interchange format for word processing applications I'll take unambiguous and explicit over ambiguous and implicit even if that is at the expense of human readability.
The MS model uses a manifest to resolve link references, the ODF uses absolute references... this is criticised by Groklaw on the basis of human readability. Not maintainablity, application use, refactoring or normalisation of data.
There are valid problems that can be cited for both formats (I wish for instance MS had stuck with XLink), but this is quickly resolving into another round of MS bad, anything else good. It's emotive and is in most cases prejudged before technical merits are weighed.
I guess I just resent being asked whether I'd prefer to transform a mixed content model by somebody I know has never done so.
The Groklaw article points out a few of them. The most damning is that Microsoft has chosen to ignore existing, reusable standards like XLink, SVG, Dublin Core, etc. for their own proprietary tags. These standards were expressly produced because they represent reusable patterns that many document formats need but which shouldn't be respecified by each of them. The upshot is that parsing OpenXML will be a massive pain in the butt because none of your existing scripts / tools / editors etc. that may have built-in knowledge of existing standards will not work with OpenXML.