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...
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?