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: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

[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.)

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.