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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."
Mostly though emphasis on the "polite" part. Imagine how persuasive someone can be when they're not a dick about it and when they just lay out some good clear arguments :)
When is a standard not a standard?
Perhaps... it's when the company who wrote it won't pass it over to standards bodies.
Perhaps we ought to have "varying" standards for road design... or we should have ever-changing standards for building construction.
Considering this is public documents are at stake, it is our history. It is no less important than safety.
Which version of .doc?
They are fairly incompatable, and not even Office can open all of the versions correctly:
95, 2000, XP, 2003?
There is no "doc" standard, it is just the memory dump of the version of Office, which changes with each release, and that is the problem.
TXT would indeed be better, if only because it isn't going to change in the future.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
I know the parent is probably going to get modded into oblivion, but they made an interesting point that will probably be missed. Why do we need to store all the information in a fully formatted document. I know that good ol' A4...or American Letter standard will persist for a long time, but surely if it's just the information we need to retain there would be a better way of storing it without all the formatting cruft thrown in that makes it hard to decipher if you don't have a massive spec to write a loader from.
Afterall everyone here is mainly worried about retaining the information in a format that is readable by future generations right? right!?
Australian running a company that does C# / C++ / Java / SQL / Python / Mathematica
Albany has not been able to pass... Governor Pataki was a union-busting asshole... Governor Spitzer has failed... Hillary Clinton votes for one idiotic bill... Chuck Schumer...
Which means now is definitely NOT the time to give up.
Let's see - the NY taxpayers are already paying this CIO's (probably hefty) salary, and she is supposed to recommend that which is best for her constituents.
From all the info I've seen regarding the matter, ODF and OOXML are two document standards. One was written by committee and has the support of multiple companies, organizations, and individuals. The other is written by a monopoly and has support of no one except MS and their paid shills.
The fact is there is absolutely no reason for a government body to go with MS's lock-in format considering the technical merits of both, and most especially the past behavior of MS. OOXML is a pseudo-standard, purposefully obfuscated to keep the MS monopoly gravy-train running smoothly.
If these government agencies can't start making no-brainer decisions in the interest of their constituents, perhaps it's time that these positions were simply abolished...
"in other words" is not spelled "another words".
Grammar on a final examination is as important as grammar in a letter to your congresscritter.
May your professor mod up your exam score.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
TXT would indeed be better, if only because it isn't going to change in the future.
What kind of TXT? ANSI? Unicode? UTF-16? Big endian? Little endian? etc, etc.. I know, my examples are probably wrong, but the point isn't.That is a good point... Just look at the floppy disks, there is lots of them yet readers are hard to find for non 3.5 sized ones. The same could happen to OOXML and other propriatary formats.
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
Ask yourself this question: "Which format would be acceptable by a book publisher?" Books have table of contents, footnotes and indexes. Depending on the typeface size and page width, the footnotes can vary on which page they're on the bottom of. The file formats you mentioned doesn't accommodate this requirement. But you make a good point, those formats should be used more often.
Perhaps because I don't want to encourage a douchebag to work for nothing for a bunch of dataminers?
There are too many, different versions of .doc and no, the majority of programs cannot read and write them "well enough" now. Anyone who's ever managed an archive of documents has probably run into .doc files that cannot be opened by any currently available version of Word. One of the things ODF is solving is the security to know in another 5 years you'll still be able to open your files. The .doc format mess does not provide that security.
So why can't they go withIf the reasons I mentioned above are not enough, it is anti-competitive. It is too burdensome for vendors bidding on writing a new application they want to sell to government contractors to have to reverse engineer a closed format or series of formats and there is no way to be sure it will work in a given instance.
Or better yet HTML?HTML does not handle all the use cases of office documents smoothly and is a pretty terrible format for exchanging documents since in many cases you'd be exchanging entire directories of files instead of a single file since all the resources in HTML are stored by reference.
...even though ODF is nice, Windows systems with Office need "plugins" to view them.And this is one of the very things adoption of ODF as a standard in large government agencies will change. MS can only hold out so long on making ODF use with MS Office difficult. When they start losing enough sales because their product is not doing what customers want, they'll change it. I'd also note that when the government provides a spec and take bids from vendors, when one vendor tells them "no" and sys they'll have to make do with something that does not meet the spec, then tries to lobby government officials in order to change the spec to one that is inferior for their customer and will cost more in the long run, well maybe it is time to rethink doing business with that vendor at all.
You answered your own question. Standardization does not equal adoption, but the State of New York is asking its CIO which format it should adopt. PDF became popular and a de-facto standard before ISO 32000 was approved, so it is important to note that a government is asking for public comment about which format to implement, regardless of ISO status.
Thats the thing. You cannot make your own office suite.
The 'open' standard is incomplete in addition to being a complete mess.
Only Microsoft has the blobs required to make MOOXML work. Only partial compatibility can be attained by other in the best of cases. OTOH ODF actually *is* an open format which is properly documented and which does evolve in the open.
On top of that, I'm not certain whether all of the Microsoft users can actually read/write MOOXML files. A large number haven't switched to the latest version of Office and don't seem to want to (or cannot if they're on Macs). In small structures I doubt they even know about the translator add ons for their version of Office (if it's even available for their version).
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