Opera CTO Hits Back at Microsoft's Standards Push

Michael writes "Opera CTO Håkon Wium Lie hit back today at Microsoft's push to fast track Office Open XML into an ISO standard, in a blistering article on CNET. He also took a swipe at Open Document Format: 'I'm no fan of either specification. Both are basically memory dumps with angle brackets around them. If forced to choose one, I'd pick the 700-page specification (ODF) over the 6,000-page specification (OOXML). But I think there is a better way.' The better way being the existing universally understood standards of HTML and CSS. Putting this to the test, Håkon has published a book using HTML and CSS."

Comments

Re:Is it mature enough?

[willy_me]

I'm a latex junkie. Latex though is a PITA to create templates and styles for. Someone willing to take up the task to modernize latex or completely replace it?

Done. It's called ConTeXt.

Re:huh?

[8-bitDesigner]

Actually one of the highlights of the CSS spec is support for non-standard display types, such as screen readers, projectors, PDA, and yes, print. CSS is a rather brilliant standard, but since W3C hasn't really seen fit to publish a reference platform for it, there's no real compliance checking in the major browers.

Re:CSS for Documents?

[Coryoth]

Ever since I started using word processors (which for me was a long time after I started using web browsers), i've always thought, why doesn't updating this style make all text with that style update? Why do I always have to change the same thing over and over again?

Such things exist. TeX provides a decent the base for such things, so it's a matter of finding a TeX centric editor. LyX would be a good example, and indeed it has the sort of functionality and general approach to document creation that you seem to be after. Of course it doesn't necessarily have all the other features that other word processors might have (like mail merge or what have you).

Re:Is it mature enough?

[indiechild]

Tables are not obsolete. Tables are still used for tabular data, which is what they were originally intended to be used for, and that has not changed.

Tables shouldn't be used for page layout -- that's what CSS is for. It's as simple as that.

Re:fsck'n ugly

[Anonymous Coward]

You're entirely right. Word/OOo aren't used for pro typesetting and page layout. But if we exclude that, then we still have many, many other formats, like RTF too (or why not even BBCode while we're at it?). Yes it's quite ugly, but I don't see (x)html + css as being the answer either:

-too many versions of html (4, and perhaps 5 soon) and xhtml (1.0, 1.1, strict, transitional, etc)
-different versions of CSS, browser support for it varies quite a bit (and is pretty much non-existent for CSS3)
-too many rendering engines, css hacks required so the content displays the same in most of them, etc
-html/css sucks at MANY things - how about a self-updating TOC? (don't even try to say some javascript parsing the DOM for header tags with certain IDs to generate it dynamically!) Hell, how can you even tell the page numbers in a html "document" anyways?
-while word/OOo formats aren't real typesetting (like InDesign CS2 would do), at least they have half-way decent typography. Yeah, no fancy glyphs or super precise kerning, but it's still usable. On the web there's only a handful of "just OK" fonts one can use (unless everything is rendered server-side as images).
-if people use html/css, there would basically be no standards *at all* or anything even resembling it (much like anything we see on the web). And I'm not sure the W3C is really going to help much here... Not that their recommendations are implemented very quickly (so many nice standards, but with basically no support e.g. xforms). And I'm not sure they're really being too helpful anymore either - more like slow and misguided IMO.

At least with the new formats you're starting fresh, with the chance to have most features (like a Table of Content), and have them implemented properly. Mind you I'm not saying the new word/OOo XML formats are perfect - nor even the answer to the problem in the first place...

And yeah, it's not like (x)html has angle brackets either ;)

Looks to me like Opera has only one tool: a hammer (or is that a web browser?) and everything is strangely starting to look an awful lot like a nail?

Re:fsck'n ugly

[EvanED]

html/css sucks at MANY things - how about a self-updating TOC? (don't even try to say some javascript parsing the DOM for header tags with certain IDs to generate it dynamically!)

This would have to be done by the tool displaying it, same as a self-updating TOC in a Word or OpenOffice Writer document. The information is present in a correctly-structured HTML document in the form of Hx tags.

Hell, how can you even tell the page numbers in a html "document" anyways?

The same way you would in a Word document. It doesn't make sense if you're looking at it as a web page in your browser, but if your editor used HTML it would work the same way. (This also partially alleviates the rendering issues.)

I wrote my thesis book this way

[Rudd-O]

And it worked out great.

http://software-libre.rudd-o.com/

Used MediaWiki to write the chapters, wrote a small python proggie (available there) to consolidate the wiki into a single HTML file (mostly conforming to the Boom! microformat), then used Prince and Hakom's book CSS to generate the PDF.

Great typesetting, collaborative book editing, screw LaTeX!

Hakom was right.

Re:How come?

[PCM2]

So I'd ask Håkon, "how come?" :)

Since nobody gets it, I'll spoil it: That's how Håkon advises people to pronounce his name. It's even on his business card.

Um... NO

[salesgeek]

ODF is not about web pages or word processing. It's a standard for office documents including spreadsheets, presentation and word processing. That's a big difference from what Opera's CTO is talking about. CSS/HTML might make a good format for one part of the suite (word processing) with a lot of work on the standard. The issue: that's not what is needed for a standard. It's about doing for office documents what HTML did for websites. ODF is actually an opportunity for opera - extend the browser to support ODF so people can post ODF documents, make dynamic applications render to ODF and so on. It takes the web to the next level and further erodes the big monopoly.

Re:fsck'n ugly

[EsbenMoseHansen]

So, McSmarty, how do I
- position an image on page 4 of my document?

You don't, nor do you want to. But you can anchor, float or bind the images to the text easily enough. This would be handled by css... for the HTML side, it would just be div and object tags --- not that you would ever see them, since this is an word app.

- add footnotes?

<p class="footnote">My footnote</p> with the appropriate CSS rule (presumably something like float: page or whatever.)

- embed fields (date, last editor...)?

Using XML entities, presumably

- mark the embedded TOC as TOC so that it gets regenerated on reload?

Regenerated on reload? Come on, have some ambition.. it should be in sync at all times. Anyway, by keeping tracks of the header tags, presumably.

HTML is *not* a description language suitable for word processing in its current state, and it is unclear it can be made so without sacrificing device indepence.

XHTML+CSS would need some expansions... but probably not much. A good layout program propably doesn't care about the device, but if it did, there are already @media tags to handle this situations. There are also a couple of other truly dedicated layout namespaces on w3 to consider.

But all this matters not. This is politics. Sadly.