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

fsck'n ugly

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but that "book" is fsck'n ugly. It doesn't even compare to a professionally typeset book, or something produced in LaTeX. I hope that isn't the "solution" to this standards "problem". Let's face it, the average Joe is going to use whatever Microsoft pushes at them. Case closed.

Re:fsck'n ugly

[AKAImBatman]

Yeah, but that "book" is fsck'n ugly. It doesn't even compare to a professionally typeset book, or something produced in LaTeX.

You don't typeset with Microsoft Word, either. Which makes the entire argument specious. Word processors like MS Word and OOo Writer are for creating common documents like letters, memos, and maybe the occasional flyer. Neither one is particularly good at anything even close to professional publishing work. Even the book authors just use Word (or surprisingly, OOo Writer!) to do the text content. That text is then exported to a more sophisticated program, where the actual typesetting and page layouts are done.

I think this fellow's point is that HTML/CSS formats can store any information that a Word Processor might need to store, with no need to invoke new technologies. To a certain extent, he may be correct. Unfortunately, HTML/CSS may make a good intermediary format, but it is not particularly good from a performance or usability perspective. Then again, XML formats in general are fairly poor choices for the same reason.

I think if we want to break this conundrum, the industry is going to have to learn how to keep local data stores that are of high performance, while exporting intermediary formats when emailing or uploading to external computers. The only problem is finding a way of doing this so that it's completely transparent to users. The mythical "mom" doesn't want to worry about emailing a document in the right format, or having the right program to read the attachment she received. She just wants it to do what she tells it, with no bloody prompting with questions she has no answers for.

Re:fsck'n ugly

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't see (x)html + css as being the answer either:

Only because you can't tell the difference between "XHTML + CSS" and "web pages".

-too many versions of html (4, and perhaps 5 soon) and xhtml (1.0, 1.1, strict, transitional, etc)

So? Pick one as your word-processor standard, and rule all the others out. The existence of too many versions of MS Word doesn't seem to have hurt the .doc format.

-different versions of CSS, browser support for it varies quite a bit (and is pretty much non-existent for CSS3)

What does browser support have to do with word processing? We're talking about word processors, not web sites.

-too many rendering engines, css hacks required so the content displays the same in most of them, etc

And this is different from word processors how? Microsoft's XML format is absolutely crammed full of hacks to duplicate obscure rendering features of obsolete versions of Word, WordPerfect, etc. And it would surprise me very much if the rendering of ODF was pixel-identical between all the products that support it.

-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!)

You're thinking of web pages, not HTML. HTML used for a document could easily have an auto-generated table of contents. Remember that we're talking about using HTML as the file format for a word processor. A word processor can trivially parse the DOM for header tags and update a table of contents without requiring any JavaScript at all. It's kind of what word processors are for.

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

By looking at the little "Page N of N" display in your word processor, I would assume.

-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).

What does "on the web" have to do with word processors? We're not talking about the web here. We're talking about word processors, which will have access to all the fonts the user owns, just like any other application.

-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).

Why not? We're talking about word processors, not the web. We're talking about computer-generated HTML, not something some 13-year-old hacked together by copying-and-pasting examples into Notepad. It would be trivial to enforce valid XHTML 1.1 + CSS2.1, for example.

Re:fsck'n ugly

[Lost my low ID nick]

So, McSmarty, how do I
  - position an image on page 4 of my document?
  - add footnotes?
  - embed fields (date, last editor...)?
  - mark the embedded TOC as TOC so that it gets regenerated on reload?
etc.

And on the CSS side, there are quite a lot of shortcomings, too.

Of course, all of this would work with custom XML tags or special id/class conventions, BUT then you'd have to specify those. And getting this below 700 pages won't be easy.

So repeat after me:

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.

Re:fsck'n ugly

[Mateo_LeFou]

"The mythical "mom" doesn't want to worry about emailing a document in the right format, or having the right program to read the attachment she received. She just wants it to do what she tells it, with no bloody prompting with questions"

No offense, but I'm getting sick of this line of reasoning. You're right, mom wants the computer to read her thoughts, know exactly what she really meant when she said X, anticipate every need she might have, and pre-calculate its complexity out of existence.

In other news, my boss would like this entire website built in one hour ($40), never need support, and scale to 300,000 users.

At a certain point IT's job goes from "give every user what heshe wants" to "educate users about what is feasible in the current technological situation.

Re:fsck'n ugly

[TheoMurpse]

So, McSmarty, how do I
    - position an image on page 4 of my document?
    - add footnotes?
    - embed fields (date, last editor...)?
    - mark the embedded TOC as TOC so that it gets regenerated on reload?

I'm on your side in this debate, but as a web dev I have knowledge over these things which you apparently do not. To embed a field, how about <meta name="author" content="TheoMurpse">. As for marking the embedded TOC, how about <div id="TOC">? For positioning an image on page 4, well, I don't know if you've ever looked at a DOC or ODT file, but the file itself says nothing about where page 3 ends and page 4 begins. Instead, you see that once the word processor has rendered the file. Thus, I see no difference between HTML and any other format. Hell, I don't even know if you can say "put this on page 4" in a LaTeX document. First of all, you'd never want to put it on page 4. Instead, you'd want to put it in between other elements, which may end up placing it on page 4, but then when you update your text on page 3, it may cause the image to need to be on page 5.

Footnotes are easy, too: Text Text that needs a footnote.<div class="footnote">This is the footnote</div>. That's the same concept as in LaTeX, the best typesetting software out there.

Classic quote for the books, gotta love XML play

[Tablizer]

"Both are basically memory dumps with angle brackets around them."

CSS for Documents?

[zaydana]

Having a word processor act more like a web browser would be awesome. 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?

While turning word processors into web browsers would be stupid, things like CSS would be awesome to have in word processors.

Re:CSS for Documents?

[1u3hr]

though at least before 2007 (which I haven't used so can't comment on) they haven't done much to bring attention to the feature

Word DOS (version 4 at least) had it back almost 20 years ago. And actually it was much easier to use styles back in the DOS version. Current versions try so hard to second guess you in the quest for user-friendliness and layering features on top of features that you can change or create new styles without knowing or intending to. Old-school required you to RTFA, but then you could use styles very efficiently. Now styles are much more sophisticated, but hardly anyone uses them correctly. I get docuements from all kinds of people, including many university lecturers. None, out of hundreds over the last 15 years, has had a clue of how to style their documents. Headings are "Normal" with font commands to make them large; body text is "Heading 1" converted to 12-point Times; bulleted and numbered lists are a minefield, tables are a quagmire of hacks, spaces and tabs, etc...

Re:CSS for Documents?

[Kjella]

Having a word processor act more like a web browser would be awesome. 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?

Every word processor I've seen like forever has support for styles. The problem is:

1) It's impossible to avoid creating a million new styles by accident. Try looking at the styles list and you'll see it's full of junk
2) It's impossible to clean up a document with such a bunch of styles, for example say you have a document which has been completely fucked up with pseudo-styles. You've set "Normal" to be what the bulk text should be, and "Headings" to what they should be. What happened last time I tried it? Well, it was impossible to easily apply it without killing any bullet lists, bold, italics or any other intended variation of the normal text. Headers and numbering went beserk. Trying to do the same with the bullet list style lead to numbers going completely nutzoid, for some reason it thought everyone in the same style belonged to the same list so later lists would start at some random number.
3) If you for some reason is stuck copying between different versions of Word (norwegian and english comes to mind) then you'll have double the number of styles, which obviously aren't in synch.

So to sum it up what I would like:
1) Don't auto-create styles
2) This sentence does not contain three styles
3) Sane "apply style" functions
      - Parituclary directed at fixing a mess
4) Make styles have an ID, at least for the default ones make them international so header 1 is header 1 in every language
5) Ability to "style-lock" documents for things like company standards, you can create new styles but not just randomly change around sizes and fonts
6) More visible styles (OpenOffice does this, MS word doesn't) because people don't see them

I don't know that I agree completely

[Evardsson]

While I do agree that the ISO doesn't need more than one standard for printable documents, I don't think that Håkon Wium Lie is on the right track with HTML/CSS for print.

Sure, it works, with enough tweaking, and CSS3, and a $350 download of a product to turn HTML/CSS3 into a PDF. This is better how? What about LyX, LaTeX, or even OpenOffice if you are just going to convert to PDF?

The whole HTML/CSS-to-print thing shoots the real argument in the foot.

Re:I don't know that I agree completely

[panaceaa]

Why is anyone even talking about the opinion of a CEO? Opera is an HTML company -- they make HTML browsers. Why would the CEO of Opera have anything objective to say about OOXML or OpenXML? He wouldn't, which is why his pushes his own company's core competency: HTML. While Opera doesn't have a huge market share, if the market for HTML viewers grows, his company's likely to take a piece of that pie. But it's completely bunk because HTML's a mess of different standards, with many people using HTML 4.01 Transitional to this day, and the idea of people adopting CSS3 and writing documents using HTML is pretty far fetched. But you would never hear that from the CEO of an HTML browser company.

Too true

[iamacat]

700 pages is not understandable by anyone but authors. "C programming language" book is 1/3 in size, have endured for 20 years and was instrumental in solving many more problems than word processing. Also, creating an ODF document is a minor function in most applications and is not worth the effort to understand such a huge standard. Proponents of both standards should come up with a modular design instead. At the base level, stick with basic HTML - bold and italic tags, fonts and sizes, paragraph breaks. Define many extensions that can be implemented independently or in any combination, in a manner convenient for both computers and, in a pinch, humans. Opera guy is biased as well - while basic HTML is great at its limited function, CSS is not very readable by humans. Nor does it solve pagination, collaborative editing, resolution independence, color profiles for printing...

You're using the wrong tool.

[Luke]

Using a word processor to write a book is like using stone tablets and and abacus for spreadsheets. You really ought to look at markup-based typesetters like LaTeX or DocBook or software specifically designed for book production.