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.

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.

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.