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ODF Threat to Microsoft in US Governments Grows
Tookis writes "Another setback for Microsoft has cropped up in the space of document formats in government organizations. The state of California has introduced a bill to make open document format (ODF) a mandatory requirement in the software used by state agencies. Similar legislation in Texas and Minnesota has added further to the pressure on Microsoft, which is pushing its own proprietary Office Open XML (OOXML) document format in the recently released Office 2007. The bill doesn't specify ODF by name, but instead requires the use of an open XML-based format."
FTFA:
"The new bill, introduced by Californian Democrat Mark Leno, does not name ODF specifically but has stipulated that by 2008 agencies must be equipped to store and exchange documents in an open, XML-based format. Although the name of Microsoft's Office Open XML suggests that it would match the requirement, it is in fact a proprietary format that would fail the open standards test."
It appears that there are more tests than the blurb indicates as to what 'standard' would be accepted. To me, it sounds like the bill is not trying to eliminate any possible software, simply to ensure that all of the apps can play nice together. That is common sense to me as far as business decisions go.
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Only if you redefine the word open to mean closed, proprietary and subject to licence fees and patents, perhaps m$ just needs to buy out the Webster and Oxford English dictionary and it can redefine the language to suit it's own twisted world view.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
According to Andy Upgrove, the Netherlands essentially were bought out by Microsoft like ANSI was. If Microsoft is successful in getting ISO approval, this California law will essentially get read in as a "Thou shalt use Microsoft Office" law.
While I hope ISO doesn't ratify OOXLM, the cynical side of me doesn't have a whole lot of hope.
It's not too surprising that the CTO of a web browser company wants us to use XHTML and CSS for this, but that doesn't make it a good idea.
XHTML and CSS are mainly for representing information in a web browser, they are great for that. Word processing is in many ways a whole different world and it makes sense to have a different format there (though one also defined by XML like XHTML is). Namely, CSS lacks a lot of the physical positioning stuff that a word processor needs, concepts such as page breaks, and so on (some things it does have, but they are generally never implemented and probably aren't enough anyhow).
XHTML is also meant for people to hand-write, it's a simple markup representing simple text. Word processing is never marked up by hand, the documents can be very complex, and anyone not looking at the source programatically will indeed think that it's a memory dump between angle brackets. That doesn't mean that it's a bad format, it's just not meant to be read that way.
Really, I don't think XHTML is the solution everywhere and pretty much any format is fine in word processing land as long as its truly open (not in the MS sense) and text-based.
> I read these stories about ODF and OOXML all the time, but I've never understood *why* these
> XML-based formats are so smiled upon. An open standard is great, but does XML really do the
> job we want here?
As I understand it, the big advantage of using XML in ODF (don't know about OOXML) is that you can extract the actual content of your document as XML, change it, resave it and it all renders properly (this assumes that your styles etc. are set up correctly).
For example, in theory I should be able to create an empty document that just contains all my style info, insert *all* the content with appropriate pointers to the styles I want to use, save it, and then someone else can come along, open my document and read my content in their program of choice. If my raw content is XML (as is increasingly the case these days), I can fairly easily automate converting it to ODF format (just as I've been able to easily convert it to HTML, PDF and a bunch of other formats for a while now). ODF then becomes a simple "container" that anyone anywhere can use without needing any proprietary tools to do so.
I can then save my content as strict XML, then render it in whatever format the user requires. If they've got Acrobat, I'll give them a PDF file; if they've got OpenOffice or AbiWord, I'll give them an ODF doc; if they've got a Web browser, I'll give them HTML. *This* is the big plus of open document formats in general; the actual format of the document essentially becomes unimportant, since anyone who wants to look at it can do so in their tool of choice. If one tool is crappy, or becomes unavailable, or doesn't support e.g. Swahili, no problem - just find a different tool.
In terms of whether XML is the optimal format for this type of data in the first place, it's probably a good fit for almost all cases, as distinct from being a really great fit for only a few cases. Depending on how you define "better", it's not hard to come up with a better format for a book than:
<title>My document</title>
<subtitle>Written by me</subtitle>
<chapter>First chapter</chapter>
<chaptertext>The quick brown fox...</chaptertext>
However, XML is here now, works well enough, is insufficiently bad to try to replace it with something else (assuming that "something else" is actually better than XML), and a lot of tools and libraries (both free and commercial) exist that make working with it pretty straightforward.
Microsoft's "Office Open XML" name reminds me of a lot of country names. Whenever one hears a country called "The People's Democratic Republic of [Somewhere]", one instantly knows it is communist. Likewise, anything "open" from Microsoft is invariably closed. Microsoft does develop open formats (like RTF) but they are never advertised as such.
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I have untarred several documents from the ODF family and found them easy to understand. I would suggest you do the same as the software to create these files is Free. If you can't be arsed to do that, then stop writing inane commentary. :)
The specification for ODF is available online. Since that is the case, please attempt to read it before spouting-off about it being unreadable. It is 722 pages long, I've had a brief look at it and it seems very readable (better than that: it looks implementable!)
In my opinion Microsoft's format is neither XML, or open. It's binary, patentable cruft in an XML wrapper. So it's best not to describe it as an 'XML Format' at all. The specification for this is reportedly 6,000 pages long. This is also available online.
The advantages of XML file formats are:
All of these were copied from the OpenOffice Web Site, explanation of the items in that list can be found there.
I'm going to transform myself into a mighty hawk. Either that or I'll just go and work at Dixons, haven't decided yet.
Read:t roductionToTheFormatInternalsr matODFVsMSXML
http://old.opendocumentfellowship.org/Articles/In
http://old.opendocumentfellowship.org/Articles/Fo
And let me know if you still think the ODF is merely a 'memory dump in angle brackets'. Maybe they could have reused a good chunk of CSS, but that would also require another type of basic parser in implementations. I imagine you've heard of expat, but can you name a standard CSS parser library? I can't, and once upon a time, I had CVS checkin privs on mozilla. Looks simple enough, but ask a web developer if they've ever heard of any major browser having CSS parser bugs.
And it looks like ODF's style definitions could maybe be generously described as CSS in XML, too. Regardless, I think you could make a pretty compelling argument that the layout needs that have historically driven CSS are a little different than a word processor's needs.
Back when I worked on Abiword, the native format was very similar to XHTML/CSS. Some arbitrary element renamings -- I believe our equivalent to the span tag was a single letter. The XML->XHTML conversion could probably have been handled by a simple sed script.
For styling, we reused as much CSS as possible. I learned about a lot of nifty stuff in CSS3 back then. I hope I get to use some of that stuff in browsers some day. But we were well on our way to the first draft of a hypothetical CSS3 Wordprocessor Module, too.
The OOXML format does strike me as a brain dead C struct to XML encoder, however. And I know the doc format pretty well, having written some non-trivial bits of wvware and the Abiword importer based on it. We actually once got a post on the mailing list from someone looking for technical details on the doc format, and they had been forwarded to us by someone on the Word team at Microsoft. They had their time-tested, battle-worn libraries, but we apparently understood the actual bytes better than anyone still in Redmond willing to help a customer.
But we all knew that the eventual Microsoft XML format was going to be silly. Actually, it's better than I expected. I had considered the occasional base64 encoded binary data structure wrapped in data tag to be a very real possibility.
In my mind, the most astonishing thing is that they just arbitrarily reimplemented -- and generally very badly -- dozens of standards, including many ISO ones. I believe they have several novel timestamp definitions, in addition to ISO's.
I'm pretty shocked anyone is even pretending OOXML is being seriously considered as a standard. I think some people in Redmond had an April Fools' joke get out of hand. If this gets standardized, I expect the next anti-trust case is going to reveal internal Microsoft emails with text such as "holy shit, ISO just accepted our format!"
PS: I don't even read slashdot that often anymore, and I very rarely post. The few times I do, I generally don't even bother to login. But it would seem that several years of random hobbyist open-source contributions have made me quite likely one of the top few dozen or so domain experts on the planet regarding your specific post. I thought that was kind of amusing myself. I don't know if anyone actually cares, but my name is Justin Bradford, and I imagine google retains sufficient evidence of what I claim.
Dammit people, read the damn bill, it's quite short. It has a four part test for formats to be adopted.
It's not perfectly worded (what are internal and external?), and it's not a perfect list, but it's a quite reasonable starting place and it doesn't allow any of the hand-wringing excuses I'm seeing in these comments. This open document stuff has been being debated in the public sector for some years now. Politicians may be many things, but they're not incapable of reading.
I've written my California Assemblyperson, you can too.
-josh