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China's Open Document Format Fight
eldavojohn writes "While there's been a lot of talk of the open document formats in the states, China is facing the same dilemma. A ZDNet blog examines the issue by pointing out they will most likely merge their current standard with either OOXML or ODF. The bulk of their post points out why OOXML shouldn't be ISO certified and is the biggest problem for Microsoft's standard: 'Another Standard, Microsoft does not support, is the specification RFC 3987, which defines UTF-8 capable Internet addresses. Consequently, OOXML does not support, to use Chinese characters within a Web address.' This would be problematic for many languages, not just Chinese."
It's hard, to read submissions, when there, are so, many, commas.
I'm surprised the character set issue hasn't come up before. Is this one reason Europe is going to ODF? (Granted, many European languages use the Roman character set, but still.) What is Japan doing with this issue?
No good deed goes unpunished. - Avon, Blake's 7
He's in charge of executing this plan.
This probably doesn't surprise many people here. Their mail client is also incapable of handling hyperlinks longer than around 78 characters, and their browser's not too great on the acid test.
What Internet standards do they support properly?
Follow me
Reading the analysis in the ZDNet Asia article, it's sounding more and more like Microsoft's OOXML was created for only two reasons. First, to quell the upsurge at the state government level the need for an "open document" format. Second, to force users into newer versions of Office that are compatible with the new "open standard". The standard Microsoft file formats (.doc, .xls, .ppt, etc) haven't major revisions in almost a decade. This allows users to continue using older versions of Office, rather then upgrade. Many of them have been reverse engineered for compatibility in non-Microsoft products. Remember, Microsoft has never profited with compatibility.
If what the article is actually true, then, Microsoft might have a tough road ahead in the international community. Microsoft wants to control the format so they can lock-in the user. You can bet that even if this version of OOXML is certified, that, some revision or change down the road in another version of Office will break compatibility. Add in a lack of complete documentation (despite the 6000 pages already completed), and you have a recipe for continued vendor lock-in.
I hope everyone sees through the Microsoft fog, and continues to develop the ODF format. If China decides to merge its format with ODF, its a step in the right direction.
Don't use UTF8 for internet addresses, use UTF7.
And make sure the user has the option to NOT display the "unicode" version. I'm not capable of distinguishing between UTF8 glyphs, which means that even if I inspect EVERY url, it's still easy to get pwned by a phisher.
I realize that /. isn't intended for fast-breaking news, but TFM is from February and a Hell of a lot has happened since then.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
We don't want to play with you.
Anyone seen a Chinese keyboard? 26000 keys! Goddamn what are the home keys you wonder? All I know is that all are painted kommie red. And like that's the even in the top 1000000 problems chinese have. #1? Being chinese! #2? Being red chinese! #3 Having no real friends in the world, except Iran and France.
it's still tagged "linux" and you have obviously been modded offtopic. next time just point out that TFA has nothing to do with linux and that the tag is misleading and enjoy your +5 informative.
Another standard is, not to use, commas like they, were going out, of style.
Feh.
..is my friend. Open Source and China? Strange bed fellows indeed.
People input Chinese by either typing the pronunciation or certain encoding in alpha beta. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_input_methods _for_computers is a poor introduction of Chinese input method on wikipedia.
One more thing is an input method developed my some of my friends recently, with this input method, only mouse is needed to write Chinese on a computer. You can download it at http://sbsrf.cn/ and try it.
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
Um, so tell me again what was wrong with UTF encoded plain text?
And don't say layout and clipart bullshit. If you want to layout a publication for print use a professional application that is up to the task (NOT MS Word or OO).
Plain text works perfectly for me on all platforms. XML, in any form (OOXML or ODF), is retarded. Period.
[IP address changed for this post to defeat Slashdot's ridiculous 30 minute post flood interval]
First, China is the most populous country in the world. Second, Japan, Korea and Vietnam also use Chinese characters.
Think global, act loco
the internet should be English Only. I'm sick of these jibber jabbering foreigners illegally getting on it without official papers to certify their right to do so. next thing you know, you wont be able to go to a porn site without being able to read chicken scratch.
The tiniest bit of analysis will lead them to conclude that it is technically impossible to merge their format with OOXML, since OOXML is not adequately defined.
I don't see how this is true... I just used Word 2007 to insert a hyperlink containing Chinese characters into a blank doc and saved it. Extracted the docx and looked at the XML inside and, sure enough, there's a nice UTF-8 encoded XML file in there that gives the target address just fine. If I ctrl-click on the link, IE7 does it's IDN thing just fine and the page comes up perfectly. What the heck is he talking about? The RFC he links to was even frigging written by a MS dude (Mike Suignard)!
It doesn't support UTF-8 domain name.
Last week didn't I read that Microsoft had dominated the Chinese market already. If they went to the MS OS then they will probably go with the document format. Don't kid yourself into thinking that the Chinese are this budding bright beacon of intellectualism that is going to have a fresh start. They are just like most of the PHB's around here, uuuuh the Jones' have it so I should have it.
He who said 1,000,000 monkeys on 1,000,000 typewriters would eventually type the great novel, never saw an AOL chat room
There is a reason RFC 3987 isn't widely supported; it's horrible.
utf-8 URLs never caught on in Japan, actually URLs never caught on here. You can see much more people typing "google" or even "" in the search box in their Yahoo (!) default landing page, than typing the URL google.com (BTW Yahoos market share here is overwhelming).
Japanese just don't type URLs they use Yahoo for searching. Many don't even use bookmarks. They just search. It's probably because they have a hard time remembering foreign name URLs in Roman letters, which except for "design" purposes don't play much of a role in Japan. It's much easier to type a japanese search term into a search box than remembering an alphabet resemblance of the same as a URL (there are two main ways of transcribing Japanese into the latin alphabets and everyone is intermixing them, so there's much unclarity about the "proper" roman letter spelling of words).
Even print advertisements nowadays, rather than putting the company URL in big letters, they tend to have a little graphic depicting a search box and a button and give you a Japanese search term you're supposed to put in your Yahoo or Google search box.
There are two rules for success:
1. Never tell everything you know.
And just yesterday, we read about the oncoming tidal wave of sub-$200 computers. In a poor country like China, these little gadgets should be way more popular than computers costing $1000, don't you think? There is no way that Microsoft will be able to dominate the sub-$200 market (and still make a decent profit). So I would say that the fight for software dominance in China has barely begun.
My spidey senses say that OOXML SP1 will be coming around shortly.
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
Sorry, but the American market is dominated by good and fast. In fact, most people around the globe want good and fast. We might settle for cheap, good and slow, but really we want the good and fast.
You should avoid a career in marketing. The slogan "cheap-but-good", while an improvement over "almost as good and getting better", wouldn't be my first choice as a replacement. How about, "we run the internets" or "they trust us on servers and we have a desktop".
Seriously folks, there are a lot of positive arguments to be made for linux but here on slashdot, most of the advocacy is from a negative viewpoint, mostly dealing with MS, Bill Gates and Balmer. The focus should be on making linux better.