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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."
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?
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That was, at the very most, a half assed at humor. There are, in fact, ways to add, not only too many commas, but enough to make, say, your head, or mine, explode upon reading the sentence, phrase, etc.
Not only that, but you can, unbelievably, even use lots of commas, while maintaining mostly, although maybe not entirely, correct punctuation.
-Eddie
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.
>Open Source and China? Strange bed fellows indeed.
Why not? I thought they were both communist plots?
Yes, let's torture a figure of speech. Deeper analysis will reveal that not only is it technically impossible, it is also practically impossible, so there will only ever be one implementation of MSOXML.
It is quite easy to extend a standard to include new things, and ODF 1.1 is well under way. However, it is practically impossible to remove broken stuff from a standard, so we would be stuck with the MSOXML dog's breakfast until Microsoft abandons it in five years.
Incidentally, are you implying that you prefer MSOXML over ODF? Wow!
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.
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