Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Wins Industry Standard Status for Office
everphilski writes "The International Herald-Tribune reports that Microsoft has won industry standard status for Office. EMCA International, a group of hardware and software makers based in Geneva, approved the MS file formats with only one dissenting vote - IBM. IBM backs the OpenDocument standard, which was approved by the ISO in May of this year." From the article: "Bob Sutor, IBM's vice president for open source and standards, called Microsoft's Office formats technically unwieldy - requiring software developers to absorb 6,000 pages of specifications, compared with 700 pages for OpenDocument. 'The practical effect is the only people who are going to be in a position to implement Microsoft's specifications are Microsoft,' Sutor said."
ECMA just confirmed the MS Open Office XML format as a standard, not Office in general. MS further states that OOXML will be an "open and royalty-free" specification.
What's also interesting is that MS will be offering a "bridge" (as a separate download) that enables Office software to read and write ODF (the OpenOffice Open Document Format) files.
Just junk food for thought...
On the top of my head: EMCAScript, Eiffel. See for yourself.
ECMA have ratified a few standards relating to JavaScript - for instance, ECMA 262 defines the language that JavaScript, JScript, ActionScript and QtScript are implementations of, and the E4X extension that allows XML literals is also an ECMA standard.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Sure it can
.bmp?
buggy- well, it can't be buggy but it can be so complex that its hard to implement without bugs
bloated- a file format can easily store data in unefficient formats
insecure- hold important data without encryption
unreliable- hold the data in a lossy way
overpriced- Standards don't have to be free, they can charge a license fee (or even refuse to license on a RAND basis)
nonintuitive- Ever tried to decode all the variations of
clunky piece of dog shit- A hard to implement format is easily described as clunky
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
They standaridized JavaScript; hence js's official name ECMAScript. However, although Netscape created javascript, ECMA based their standard on the "clean room" document Microsoft created in the process of reimplementing javascript, errors and all. The upshot was that after standardization, netscape was instantly in violation the standard of the language they themselves had created.
It's ECMA. It even says that in the page you've linked to. And the original article. This Slashdot typo's infectious - it seems to have spread to half the comments posted already...
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
I had to laugh when I hear IBM describe a competitors offering as 'unwieldy', as opposed to anything IBM which requires legions of IBM 'consultants' to achieve basic functionality. That aside though I belive the majority of the 6000 pages he is referring to is actually a 4000 page primer on the markup MS use, complete with verbose desciption, examples and pretty pictures etc.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Does anyone know whether Apple will include support for ODF (Open Document Format) in Pages? For more a bigger testament of industry standard is getting it used by enough people.
BTW It should be noted that Office essentially uses OLE for its binary document formats. For this reason anything you add to an Office document is essentially an embeded data type. Their XML format is another beast.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Actually, there are infact ANSI standards for databases. This how you can have a single database schema and codebase support MS SqlServer, DB2 and Oracle.
AIX conforms to posix and uses utilities common to all Unixes.
Websphere can conform to the specs for J2EE.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Umm blink was NS marquee was IE.
Were that I say, pancakes?
Go take a look at it and judge for yourself. The open document formats are fairly reasonable XML-based structures (as "reasonable" as XML can ever be). MS Office XML abuses XML and is horrendously complex.
From a practical point of view, OpenDocument already works for interchanging between multiple open source apps.
In addition, Microsoft's file format is patented and Microsoft uses that patent to spread FUD. While the patent probably wouldn't stand, it's an additional reason not to use MS's office formats.
Actually, "quirks mode" refers to the way earlier versions of Netscape displayed pages. That's why IE also has a "quirks mode" activated when doctype sniffing fails.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Yes. I wrote a BMP parser at a previous job just so the Web browser could display those cutesy little icons in the address bar and bookmark list. BMP is an ill-specified piece of $#!+ and should be slain in the public square before jubilant onlookers.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Actually, Netscape submitted the JavaScript spec for standardisation as ECMAScript in November 1996.
Using HTML in email is like putting sound effects on your phone calls. Just say <strong>no</strong>.
Microsoft own and control future versions of their format, and control the biggest (and currently only) implementation of it.
ODF on the other hand is controlled by a group of companies, a group that microsoft was given every chance to join. Any standard should be controlled in this way, either by a group of competing companies or an independent body, otherwise it can always be twisted to favour one vendor at the expense of another.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Word 2007 - the one that is not out yet.
Just saying it like it are.
That whole mess has been superseded by the covenant not to sue (a long time ago now!). So no, the sky is not falling...
/ 04/688932.aspx
See: http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2006/08
--
So would I, but I don't even have to go that far.
Fact is: Ever crack open a WordML document? I thought it'd be easy for a work project to do some specialized convert-Word-to-XML -- just a quick XSLT, or maybe I'd actually have to write a quick Perl script...
Took one look at it and gave the fuck up. Ok, I Googled it, found nothing, took another long, long look, still couldn't even figure out where to start.
Remember: Saying you use an XML file format is like me saying I use an ASCII-based programming language. Now, I still hate Java, but I'd rather program in Java than Brainfuck -- and you'll notice, both are "ASCII-based" and "open standards".
So, end of my story, I not only found OpenDocument easy to read, I found a Ruby OpenDocument-to-XHTML conversion tool already written and LGPL'd, and I've been able to adapt it to our needs fairly easily. It's not a one-liner or even one page, but everything in there makes perfect sense, and where it doesn't, the OpenDocument XML does. It was worth the extra processing time to simply run the original .doc through AbiWord to generate ODT, then through a Ruby script (slowest language I know) to generate the HTML, and finally run it through a quick Perl script to upload it -- and all of that took less time than it would take me to figure out whatever the fuck Word was doing.
OfficeXML is NOT an open format. It is essentially an XML serialization of Office data structures. It makes it only slightly easier to decypher than it would be to decypher the .doc format -- and if they were really opening up, why not give us the actual .doc as well? We need that just as badly -- right now, the theoretical "best" way to switch to another format is to buy the latest version of Office, use it to convert all your files to Microsoft's XML, then use OpenOffice (or whatever) to convert MS's XML to OpenDocument. Since MS obviously isn't going to hand out upgrades for free, we need specs so OpenOffice can do what we already pretty much do -- read Word files directly and save them as ODT.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Because a simple to implement format would make it trivial to write applications that work with Office data, and all the installations of office that need only simpler processing of said data would have no reason at all to buy the office suite. Other example, if Microsoft had released perfectly documented APIs, WINE would have been completed long ago (and outperforming WinXP, probably) Were you being sarcastic? if not, read up about past MS practices.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol