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Microsoft Claims OpenDocument is Too Slow
SirClicksalot writes "Microsoft claims that the OpenDocument Format (ODF) is too slow for easy use. They cite a study carried out by ZDNet.com that compared OpenOffice.org 2.0 with the XML formats in Microsoft Office 2003. This comes after the international standards body ISO approved ODF earlier this month." From the ZDNet article: "'The use of OpenDocument documents is slower to the point of not really being satisfactory,' Alan Yates, the general manager of Microsoft's information worker strategy, told ZDNet UK on Wednesday. 'The Open XML format is designed for performance. XML is fundamentally slower than binary formats so we have made sure that customers won't notice a big difference in performance.'"
It's actually likely they're slightly faster for spreadsheets. For example:
* they use single-letter tag names, for the most part, to reduce parsing time
* they remove all strings and put them in a look-up table
I'm not sure how much difference these things actually make in practice, but there's probably a little speed there.
What's not fair is to compare OOo to Microsoft Office, and determine the speed of OpenDocument versus OXML based on that...
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+5 Insightful? Oh PLEASE!
.doc files. So are Microsoft's new XML files. So it's pointless to claim that a "binary" file format is faster than an XML file format.
ODT XML files are binary files. So are old Word 2003
When people say "binary files" they mean this as opposed to "text files", a seperation that stems from the ability to open a file for in "binary" or "textfile" modus in several APIs. Has to do with, amongst others, interpretation of control codes such as ^Z.
The other big mistake: file formats aren't fast or slow. The algorithms for reading and writing them are (or aren't) slow.
*slaps cheek* NO WAI!
You fail to see the point of what they're saying. They're saying a binary file, with a header and fixed data structures, are alot easier to read & parse than an XML file, which consists of structures of variable length, needs to be interpreted, etc etc etc. This is a problem with XML.
I'm Rocco. I'm the +5 Funny man.
I've noticed that Word will stream open a large DOC file, so that you can start to work on it before it's been entirely loaded -- similar to a web page.
DOC files don't so much as stream as open for Random Access. They're structured in such a way that the information is stored as an object heirarchy scattered across the file. This makes saving faster because only the changes are saved to the file. It also make opening faster, because Office only needs to pull up the information that's on the screen at the moment. (Even if it's at the end of the document.) PDFs work in a similar, but more structured, fashion.
The unfortunate fact about ODF is that it requires a complete decoding of the file when loading, and a complete reencoding of the file when saving. However, I don't see any reason why Microsoft can't just add ODF support and make it an optional format. Computers are fast these days, and it should be up to the user to decide whether he needs the performance provided by the MS DOC *cough* "standard".
Or in other words, Microsoft is grasping at straws, trying to find a reason why they shouldn't support opening and saving of ODF files. I feel so sorry for them. (Not.)
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