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ODF Plugins and a Microsoft Promise of Cooperation
Andy Updegrove writes "Last week, the Massachusetts Information Technology Division (ITD) issued a Request for Information (RFI) on any plugins that might be under development to assist it in migrating from a MS Office environment to one based upon software that supports ODF. The RFI acknowledges the fact that it may be necessary or advantageous to see some of the code in Office in order to enable the types of features that the ITD is looking for. Conveniently, Jason Matusow, Microsoft's Director of Standards Affairs, had this to say on the occasion of ODF's approval by the members of ISO and the IEC: "The ODF format is limited to the features and performance of OpenOffice and StarOffice and would not satisfy most of our Microsoft Office customers today. Yet we will support interoperability with ODF documents as they start to appear and will not oppose its standardization or use by any organization. The richness of competitive choices in the market is good for our customers and for the industry as a whole." Presumably such support will include helping the plug-in developers that will assist Massachusetts migrate from a MS Office environment to one based upon ODF-compliant office productivity software."
Well said. The biggest flaw in the ODF standard as its stands is that it doesn't really use XML's capabilities for, well, extensibility. There is no way in ODF to include your own data with your own schema (in a separate namespace) and have OO.o preserve that data, keep it with the appropraite document elements, delete it if the associated document elements are deleted, and so on. Let alone anything so interesting as interact with it or access it via plug-ins or extensions to add new capabilities.
The ODF spec gives almost no consideration to the perservation and manipulation of third party markup. OO.o currently just discards it silently when loading a document, and the saved copy omits any unrecognised markup.
The MS Office formats do offer all these features, and for that reason alone I'm starting to hope MS wins this one. Both formats seem like uninspring choices for different reasons, but at least the MS one won't artificially limit features and give the "universal" format the reputation of being limited, unreliable for more than basic uses, and crap.
I'm actually really interested in the new Office features for embedded third party markup and interaction with it via forms, etc. It has some interesting possibilities for use at work and with some other tools I'm involved with, and it's something I'd very much like to expore. If OO.o could support the same capabilities I'd be a very happy man, but I just don't see it happening.
Just because you *can* do something, doesn't mean it is wise to do so.
Next time you feel the need to create a Frankenstein document, think about alternatives to MS Word.... think about an actual workflow process that won't crash every other machine that uses it (we don't know how your system is able to process such insanity but none of the other PCs in the office will run this damn piece of crap MS Word version of an application that should have been written as a real executable by our IT staff, thanks Bob in Management...), and for God's sake, THINK ABOUT THE CHILDREN!!!!
Just say no to MS Word Macros....
Brought to you by the Council on Macro Abuse Syndrome
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.