Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Opposing California Open Doc Bill
ZJMX writes "Microsoft is going through its email and phone lists asking people to support their opposition to California A.B. 1668 — 'Open Document Format, Open Source' — by writing to the California Assemblymen involved in this bill (contact info in the link). Apparently they fear that California will join Massachusetts in wanting documents based on open standards in their government. Let's see if this community can raise as much support for the California ODF bill as Microsoft can raise opposition."
This ODF stuff is just another shitty typewriter document to go with Word documents. Ugh. You might as well call it SHITHTML it is another useless HTML replacement. Think of how useless XHTML has been and it at least attempted to be as similar to HTML as it could be. ODF is more shit that has to be converted into something else before it can even do something useful. It is like you are saving your word processor's cache file to disk and then expecting someone else to do the rest of the job to make something that is sharable, and you excuse that by saying that you'll publish the cache file spec. Ugh.
What is the point of unleashing countless office workers to make countless documents that are not even sharable? The Web is 17 years old. The standardized Web is 7 years old. I can generate sharable documents just by going to Flickr, but with Word or ODF, no. It is painless to generate HTML 4.01 programmatically using DOM methods or manage word processing styles with CSS. There are two mature open source Web browser engines that can be used in a word processor product and countless other developer resources. It is not a programming problem.
At the UI level a word processor should do all the little tricks that people want. At the data storage level, it should be generating ISO HTML with CSS and JavaScript that can be either natively displayed on the Web or reliably converted to PDF for printing. You can store that and you can always read it. In other words you are storing something finished, not just the arbitrary bullshit that some word processor uses for pseudo-synaptic function. As people work, instead of generating unmanageable "word processor documents", users generate manageable Web content.
It's ridiculous to suggest that the typing of office workers should be stored as anything other than HTML. Microsoft Word is not the king of the making and sharing of documents, that is the Web. Base your new word processor standard on the Web and it will be successful. Ignore the Web and you are just being another Microsoft, stuck in time.
Look how hard it is to get a programmer to use UTF-8 instead of Latin-1 and the same programmer expects the office worker to use ODF instead of HTML it is crazy.
Same thing underneath? Really? Complete redesign of Office to be based on XML standard is the same thing as vendor lock? Their intent is not questionable. They are a public company with responsibility to share holders. Their intent is to make money. And that should be obvious to anyone with half a brain and over the age of 6. Its great that you want government to tell the companies what standard to use. Government have been doing such a great job regulating everything else, please lets have them do this as well. Open source community loves to have government regulate Microsoft, but would scream bloody murder if someone tries to regulate open source development.