Slashdot Mirror
New York Decision On ODF Vs. OOXML Approaching
christian.einfeldt writes "In August of 2007, the State of New York passed legislation requiring its CIO, Melodie Mayberry-Stewart, to gather information on the advantages and disadvantages of adopting either ODF or OOXML as a document standard, and to report her findings by 15 January 2008. As part of her duties under that legislation, the CIO issued a Request For Public Comment to get feedback on the topic. The deadline for that public comment is 28 December 2007 — so there is still time for the Slashdot crowd to be heard."
correct... another words use constructive criticism should you add input before the decision is made. List the pros and cons and be clear and to the point. Its kind of like a resume... If the employer sees many misspelled words, way to long, or with a font thats hard to read, etc will be ignored. If I was to write in with feedback I would put what I want in bullet points and have the text bold. Under that I will argue the pros and cons etc... I would follow the same form throughout my commenting. I find it to be the best way to get your point across. Forgive my horrible comment grammer but I just wanted to add my comment to the discussion. Getting back to History final exam prep along with the Spanish one... :-(
The following are the minimal characteristics that a specification and its attendant documents must have in order to be considered an open standard:
* The standard is adopted and will be maintained by a not-for-profit organization, and its ongoing development occurs on the basis of an open decision-making procedure available to all interested parties (consensus or majority decision etc.).
* The standard has been published and the standard specification document is available either freely or at a nominal charge. It must be permissible to all to copy, distribute and use it for no fee or at a nominal fee.
* The intellectual property - i.e. patents possibly present - of (parts of) the standard is made irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis.
* There are no constraints on the re-use of the standard.
These commonly accepted criteria are enough to ignore the whole OOXML vs ODF discussions as OOXML patent licesing conditions only fake compliance. No one trusts the OSP and the CNS from Microsoft. And openness of the ongoing ISO process is a running gag.
In case you didn't know, ODF is basically just what you mentioned. If you rename your ODF file to .zip, you can open it and see all those files inside. It doesn't use XHTML, but it does use XML to store the document text and structure. It stores all the style information in another XML document, and it stores all the pictures in a folder called Pictures. All this is wrapped up in a little zip file.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
The problem with that is that ODF is also undergoing massive changes. The version currently working its way through standardization adds the OpenFormula spec to ODF, which is something like 25% of the size of ODF. That's a pretty massive change!
ODF at its heart is a zipped folder of unicode formated text files. In 10 years when nobody cares you can still fire up a perl parser and run thru the files in a standard fashion to pick out your data. OOXML doesn't ever guarantee you will get by with anything less than a full office suite.
Gah. Here's a FAQ you may find useful:
Q: What does open office and MS Office have to do with a document standard?
A: Nothing.
Q: What does the GUI of your word processor have to do with the format you save a document in?
A: Nothing.
Q: Why do you need to use open office if you use ODF?
A: You don't, use whatever software you like.
Q: What does the open source software development model have to do with open information standards?
A: Nothing.
Q: Does using ODF mean that communists will steal my children?
A: No.
Q: Will aliens eat my brain if I equate information standards with software implementations?
A: Yes.
Part of the rationale for OOXML is that organizations and developers can extend it with additional features: (http://www.ecma-international.org/news/TC45_current_work/OpenXML%20White%20Paper.pdf)
So users (including application vendors) can extend the format to meet future needs. Sounds good, until you realize the claim made above is technically impossible: you can't guarantee semantic interoperability with vendor extensions, only syntactic interoperability. In other words you can parse the custom bits into their components, but you don't necessarily know what to do with them.
The upshot is that you are not only locked into MS products, you are thoroughly chained to their upgrade cycle as well. One of the great attractions of having a standard is the idea that you should be able to interchange documents between Word 2020 and Word 2015; however this can't be guaranteed. On top of this Microsoft's own track record with consistently rendering its own formats between app versions is poor, and combined with the sloppiness of the OOXML standard, you can't even count on upward compatibility.
OOXML fabricates entirely new component standards for things like vector drawing instead of using existing standards like SVG. This means you are not only locked into MS products in cases where 90% of the world uses them, but you're nudged into MS products where only 10% of the world uses them.
Finally, it is inaccurate to frame this as a choice between MS Office and OpenOffice. It would appear that MS is the only organization that can create a fully compliant OOXML implementation, whereas ANYBODY can write ODF, whether they are commercial vendors like IBM/Lotus or open source projects like Abiword or Gnumeric. Furthermore if Microsoft refuses to implement an ODF standard, MS Office users could still work with ODF by several mechanisms, such as an Office VBA extension, through an XSL transformation program, or by saving in a legacy format and processing with the OO import filters. The undocumented proprietary features of the document would of course be stripped out by this, but that's the very point of having a standard: to have your documents in a completely documented format.
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I work in publishing, and the format that we generally use is PDF, for just the reason you state. The typeface, page sizes, etc. are all contained in the PDF file, so there's no problem with footnotes moving pages, because the contents of the pages are fixed in the file.
I wish PDF were completely open and that we could convince everyone who distributes documents to use PDF for that purpose. All the problems you mention are just as troublesome when opening a Word file on two different machines (which is why "real" writers/publishers don't use Word). I can't tell you the time wasted on some of the rinky-dink (non-paper-published) projects I've seen where two people opening the same Word file saw different things because Word displays pages based on any number of different parameters that are not the same between machines. Heck, it doesn't even PRINT the same as it displays.
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