RTF Vs. OOXML

Rob Weir has an interesting essay comparing the viciousness of RTF and OOXML: "The [document format standard] concerns of 2004 (or 1995 even) are very similar to the concerns of 2007... 'RTF is defined as whatever Word saves when you ask it to save as RTF.' This should sound familiar. OOXML is nothing more than the preferences of Microsoft Office. Whenever Word changes, OOXML will change. And if you are a user or competitor of Word, you will be the last one to hear about these changes. The coding of Office 14 a.k.a. Office 2009 is well underway. Beta releases are expected in early 2008. But are file format changes needed to accommodate the new features being discussed in Ecma? No. Are they being discussed in ISO? No. Are they being discussed anywhere publicly? No. By owning the 'standard' and developing it in secret, in an Ecma rubber-stamp process, Microsoft rigs the system so they can author an ISO standard with which they are effortlessly compatible, while at the same time ensuring that their products maintain an insurmountable head start in implementing these same standards. Is this how an open standard is developed?"

Comments

well, not effortlessly

[yagu]

Up front disclaimer: This article has a tangible odor of troll, so don't blame me and the other posters for responding in kind (flamebait, troll, offtopic, etc.)

FTS:

By owning the 'standard' and developing it in secret, in an Ecma rubber-stamp process, Microsoft rigs the system so they can author an ISO standard with which they are effortlessly compatible

I wouldn't say this is entirely true (effortless) on Microsoft's part. Any user of any Microsoft product is well aware of how difficult it is to work in and out of various new vs. old formats. Yes, even Microsoft has a difficult time being compatible and interoperable with Microsoft (actually, I seem to have better luck overall with interoperability using OpenOffice...).

And, also FTS:

Is this how an open standard is developed?

Actually no, usually Microsoft takes an existing open standard (e.g., sockets), implements it poorly (winsock), and puts it everywhere (95,98, NT, XP, etc.) forcing the technical community to re-adopt the standard in Microsoft's cast.

Re:well, not effortlessly

[Corporate Troll]

Any user of any Microsoft product is well aware of how difficult it is to work in and out of various new vs. old formats.

You'd think that, wouldn't you? Actually, my experience is that users are blissfully ignorant about document incompatibilities caused by any software (not particular to Microsoft). Today, I received an email from a friend of mine asking how she could open a .rm file on her Apple. I was more surprised that some people still use that format. However, it was required listening (viewing?) for one of her courses.

In this case I fault the professor of that course, but how many times do you get people that say it's your fault when you can't open a document they said. After all, it works on their machines.

Re:well, not effortlessly

[Gr8Apes]

You know, if the only item I had to compare formats with was MS and applications trying to be MS, I might have come to your conclusion.

However, you should look to older and other standards. HTML - 4 versions and all of them work seamlessly together, although newer versions may not have the pizazz in older renderers. WordPerfect and WordStar, good examples of how file formats don't have to break backwards compatibility from what I recall.

As for winsock, that was a poor port of the BSD socket stack. Actually, it's a really poor port. Multicast still doesn't work, and if it did, an entire set of applications could occur with much lower traffic on the internet. (Think IPTV, IPRadio, and other streaming type applications)

Re:well, not effortlessly

[elronxenu]

OpenCourseWare?

I tried to view a video from that just the other day and what they sent was a .rm file. Why can't they provide an mpeg or AVI encoding?

Re:well, not effortlessly

[kanweg]

"I wouldn't say this is entirely true (effortless) on Microsoft's part. Any user of any Microsoft product is well aware of how difficult it is to work in and out of various new vs. old formats. Yes, even Microsoft has a difficult time being compatible and interoperable with Microsoft"

The problem is mainly caused by trying to develop a convoluted standard to make it difficult to create a standard that is difficult for others to figure out AND then understand your own convoluted standard and how to make it compatible with your previous convoluted standard which others already deciphered for a major part.

Bert

Re:well, not effortlessly

[LWATCDR]

AVI is a just as proprietary as rm if not more so.
With Helix you can have an FOSS program that can read rm files.
Yes Mpeg would be more open.

Re:well, not effortlessly

[kebes]

By owning the 'standard' and developing it in secret, in an Ecma rubber-stamp process, Microsoft rigs the system so they can author an ISO standard with which they are effortlessly compatible

I wouldn't say this is entirely true (effortless) on Microsoft's part. Any user of any Microsoft product is well aware of how difficult it is to work in and out of various new vs. old formats I think the "accusation" of it being effortless for Microsoft was not in relation to backwards-compatibility, but rather that Microsoft's new products are effortlessly compatible with Microsoft's new standards, for the simple reason that they become the definition of the standard.

If, for instance, Office 2009 has several bugs with respect to how it renders OOXML, then these bugs will actually become part of the de facto OOXML standard. Anyone who wants to implement the "standard" will have to reproduce those bugs in order to appear to be "the same as MS Office." This is the same problem the Wine team has when re-implementing the Windows API: they actually have to deviate from the established API documentation and reproduce Windows bugs since Windows applications rely on these bugs.

If you let a "standard" (like OOXML) be tied to a specific implementation of the standard, then anyone who wants to re-implement the standard must make the tough choice between being true to the letter of the standard (as written) or the de facto standard as embodied in the dominant implementation. We saw with IE's buggy implementation of HTML the problems this can cause, and are only now pulling ourselves out of that particular mess.

The problem is that Microsoft can alter the OOXML "standard" to their heart's content simply by changing the way MS Office works in future versions. Documented or not, those changes will effortlessly become "the new standard" by virtue of their dominant market position.

Re:well, not effortlessly

[samkass]

In theory VC-1 is the "open" descendant of AVI. It is part of both the Blu-Ray and the HD DVD spec, and roughly equivalent to WMP9's file format. It's kind of interesting that no one talks about needing to read VC-1, while there are zillions of MP4 players and even quite a few AVI players.

Re:well, not effortlessly

[MMC Monster]

Up front disclaimer: This article has a tangible odor of troll, so don't blame me and
the other posters for responding in kind (flamebait, troll, offtopic,
etc.)

I wouldn't call it completely a troll. It's more like calling a spade a spade.

Open standards should be things that are discussed in open before they are finalized.

OOXML and RTF are documentation of the habits of an office suite. And habits can be broken.

Re:well, not effortlessly

[Corporate Troll]

I didn't ask what the context was. I had not much other choice than to point her to RealPlayer (which worked). I would have pointed her to Real Alternative, but I didn't know of such a program for Mac OS X. (VideoLAN seemed not to have a implementation yet either)

Re:well, not effortlessly

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually no, usually Microsoft takes an existing open standard (e.g., sockets), implements it poorly (winsock), and puts it everywhere (95,98, NT, XP, etc.) forcing the technical community to re-adopt the standard in Microsoft's cast. Oh? What's wrong with Winsock? It had asynchronous sockets ahead of its time. What changes did it force on anyone else?

Re:well, not effortlessly

[Corporate Troll]

avi is a container format. It can contain pretty much anything, including Theora. For the moment, I recommend encoding in H264 and you can put it in an avi container. Not a problem at all.

Getting a decoder for that is pretty much painless...

Re:well, not effortlessly

[krazytekn0]

Becuase still, somehow our schools know next to nothing about the value of open standards. Microsoft word viewer is "required" by my college but it would be fairer to say that MS Office 07 is really what all the Profs are trying to "require". I turn in pdf's and at least one instructor asks for a word document every semester.

Re:well, not effortlessly

[Ash-Fox]

AVI is a just as proprietary as rm if not more so.
With Helix you can have an FOSS program that can read rm files.
Yes Mpeg would be more open.

A OGM or MKV container that uses Vorbis for audio streams and Theora for video would be considered a 100% open format. MPEG, Realmedia codecs and their containers, less so.

Re:well, not effortlessly

[Arancaytar]

Yes, even Microsoft has a difficult time being compatible and interoperable with Microsoft

And this is supposed to indicate the difficulty of adhering to principles of backward compatibility? Or the flaws of the design process used by Microsoft?

Re:well, not effortlessly

[badfish99]

See, for example, here. It was similar enough to bsd sockets that Microsoft could claim "compatibility", and sufficiently different that in practice you had to re-write all your code.

Re:well, not effortlessly

[Inda]

I know this isn't ask slashdot but couldn't she have just uploaded it to YouTube and got them to convert it?

Re:well, not effortlessly

[Corporate Troll]

Frankly, that solution didn't even occur to me. Would it work? I don't know. Clever idea, nevertheless. Try it out if you have a .ra file lying around. I most certainly do not have one.

However, many people don't even know how youtube works either. An acquaintance of my wife tried to send a huge movie for New Years wishes by email. Not surprisingly it bounced and by accident she got me on the phone and I tried to explain that huge attachemts aren't a good idea and that she should just put it on youtube. I even was willing to walk her through the process by phone. She didn't want to.

Re:well, not effortlessly

[Maxo-Texas]

That's really not the case.

In fact, look up how it went down for Word95 and Windows 98.
Word violated the api standards but was given the "approved" mark anyway.
Corel which followed the standards was much slower.

Microsoft cheats all the time. They are commensurate scammers.

Sometimes, it feels like the world is crazy because no one seems to recall things like
1) specifically checking if DR Dos was installed- and if so give a hard installation failure.
2) "Dos isn't done until Lotus won't run"
3) Doublestac
4) The entire "95" certification scandal.
5) The *numerous* partnerships where they robbed every bit of technology from the technology partner and then brought out a competing product.
6) The numerous times that they added a 50 to 60% functional but "free" version of something of a competitor's product to the operating system.

and so many more examples like this.

They are extremely competitive scammers. Which is okay if you own their stock. But not okay if you want to do something for the common good like standard.

Re:well, not effortlessly

[Androne]

As for winsock, that was a poor port of the BSD socket stack. Actually, it's a really poor port. Multicast still doesn't work, and if it did, an entire set of applications could occur with much lower traffic on the internet. (Think IPTV, IPRadio, and other streaming type applications)

Multicast still wouldn't work since the vast majority (at least here in Canada) of ISPs filter multicast packets because they think they are the same as broadcast packets and thus increase network traffic, I know about this since I worked on a project that had used multicast data transmission for communication and it worked on the local area network (a win2k network) but not when we tried to do it over the internet.

Like I said it turned out the ISP was filtering multicast and several told us they had no intention of turning it on because it increased network load. We explained that the difference in broadcast and multicast and that multicast would effectively lighter it they wouldn't believe us. This was my experience here in Canada 5- 6 years ago.

I will admit this was 6 years ago and things could have changed but I doubt it, ISPs in Canada tend to stagnation at times, it works so leave it alone. To use multicast you had to use Winsock 2.2 if I recall correctly, and we did see a tremendous benefit the network load on our project was greatly reduced.

Re:well, not effortlessly

[Anonymous Coward]

Sometimes, it feels like the world is crazy because no one seems to recall things like 1) specifically checking if DR Dos was installed- and if so give a hard installation failure. 2) "Dos isn't done until Lotus won't run" 3) Doublestac 4) The entire "95" certification scandal. 5) The *numerous* partnerships where they robbed every bit of technology from the technology partner and then brought out a competing product. 6) The numerous times that they added a 50 to 60% functional but "free" version of something of a competitor's product to the operating system.

Can you provide links with more details on the first four?

Re:well, not effortlessly

[somersault]

I didn't realise RTF was a Microsoft product.. for some reason I had considered it open just because I've seen it in most applications I've used. I recently told someone to use it when she got a new laptop that didnt have office on it, and needed to write an essay at short notice. Her teacher then added notes to it which didnt show up in Wordpad, but showed up when I opened the document in Word (which I then saved as HTML so that she could see the notes..!). Anyway, since I don't use any stuff like tracking document changes and that kind of crap, then I think RTF does the job for most documents... does graphics, tables, even lets you add in comments, yada yada.. personally I just use plain text in most files, but then I'm not some marketing droid who feels the need to make things look pretty..

Re:well, not effortlessly

[Maxo-Texas]

Dos isn't done...
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22dos+isn't+done+until+lotus%22&btnG=Search

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=microsoft+stac+lawsuit&btnG=Search
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics
Stac executives were outraged, as Microsoft had previously been in discussions with Stac to license its compression technology, and had discussions with Stac engineers and examined Stac's code as part of the due diligence process.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&q=%22microsoft+stole%22+technology+partners+stole+stac&spell=1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft
Burst.com, which claims that Microsoft stole Burst's patented technology for delivering high speed streaming sound and video content on the internet.

Caldera, which accused Microsoft of having modified Windows 3.1 so that it would not run on DR DOS 6 although there was no technical reason for it not to work.[64] Some claim that Microsoft put encrypted code in five otherwise unrelated Microsoft programs in order to prevent the functioning of DR DOS in pre-releases (beta versions) of Windows 3.1.[65] Microsoft settled out-of-court for an undisclosed sum.

Spyglass, which licensed its browser to Microsoft in return for a percentage of each sale; Microsoft turned the browser into Internet Explorer and bundled it with Windows, giving it away to gain market share but effectively destroying any chance of Spyglass making money from the deal they had signed with Microsoft; Spyglass sued for deception and won a $8 million settlement.[67]

I can't find any mention of the Corel wordperfect vs Word95 thing any more. I guess 1995 was almost pre-internet. It was well known at the time tho.

Re:well, not effortlessly

[lysse]

...don't blame me and the other posters for responding in kind (flamebait, troll, offtopic, etc.)

I damned well will. You're entirely responsible to how you reply to someone, no matter how much of a provocation you believe they were presenting. You don't magically become less of an ass because someone else was an ass first.

Re:well, not effortlessly

[spectecjr]

Doublestac

I remember Doublestac! That was the one where the USPTO gave out two patents for the same technology - and Microsoft held one, and Doublestac held the other. Microsoft having deliberately searched for compression technology that wouldn't infringe on Doublestac's patents, found this one, bought it, and then found out that "oh no they di'n't".

You might want to stop using that one as an example. It's a great one of the ineffectiveness of the US Patent Office, and how software patents suck. It's a lousy one of Microsoft wrongdoing - because it shows nothing of the sort.

You might want to do a little research too before spouting off the same old same old.

Re:well, not effortlessly

[Maxo-Texas]

I think you need to read my other post linked to this one.

Microsoft pretended to be a technology partner to Stac and pillaged them for IP.

Then Stac sued Microsoft and won.

Then Microsoft simply bought Stac for it's market value which was less than the penalty of the lawsuit.

I did do the research- current information on the web (in the other post) backs this position up.

So you might want to do the same before spouting off without providing references.

Re:well, not effortlessly

[spectecjr]

Sure... here's my research:

http://www.ross.net/compression/introduction.html
"Unfortunately, during this happy rollout, some patents popped out of
the US patent system that cast a shadow over the LZRW series algorithms,
and they became effectively unuseable in any practical application. If
you want to use them in any product (whether free or commercial), you
will have to do some in-depth patent homework and algorithm
development/modification so as to avoid infringement. If you think
that's easy, then you should be aware that Microsoft tried to use an
LZ77/LZRW1/etc variant, specifically designed not to infringe existing
patents, in its MS-DOS V6 operating system, and ended up having to pay
Stac about $80m in the resulting patent lawsuit. For this reason, I
would like to take this opportunity to state that the code provided in
this web (and FTP site) is provided with the intention that it be used
for educational and recreational use only. "

http://www.ross.net/compression/patents_notes_from_ccfaq.html
"LZ77 Patents

  Waterworth patented a LZ77 variant (US Patent 4701745). This algorithm
is generally referred to as as LZRW1, because Ross Williams reinvented
it later and posted it on comp.compression on April 22, 1991. The same
algorithm has later been patented by Gibson & Graybill (US Patent
5049881). The patent office failed to recognize that the same algorithm
was patented twice, even though the wording used in the two patents is
very similar.

The Waterworth patent is now owned by Stac, which won a lawsuit against
Microsoft, concerning the compression feature of MS-DOS 6.0. Damages
awarded were $120 million. (Microsoft and Stac later settled out of
court.) "

Re:well, not effortlessly

[xenocide2]

Youtube requires you hold copyright on all uploaded material. Not that anyone heeds the rule, but some people are pissed and there's no reason to require a student to lie to people during their studies.

Re:well, not effortlessly

[Maxo-Texas]

I'm confused. You seem to be agreeing with me.
And your post doesn't contradict the fact that Microsoft pretended to be a technology partner to Stac and pillaged them for IP. A practice which they used many times with other small companies that had new technology ideas.

From here: http://www.vcnet.com/bms/departments/catalog/catalog.shtml

Stac
Developer of Stacker file compression software.
After a failed attempt to license Stacker for DOS 6.0, Microsoft developed a similar product which infringed on Stac's patents. Stac was awarded $120 million in damages, which was partially settled with an investment in Stac by Microsoft.

I remember this investment was reported in the press as "buying" stac at the time. However
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics
Seems to say they existed for a few more years before the disk compression market was slaughtered by cheap high capacity hard drives.

Re:well, not effortlessly

[Gr8Apes]

IIRC, multicast for windows only works on LANS. The windows stack can't route it. It's likewise been 7 years since I dealt with this issue on windows, so I freely admit I could be fuzzy about the fine details.

Re:well, not effortlessly

[Hucko]

If it works on lans (IP) why wouldn't it work on the internet? Unix systems are still the most common server/router systems.

Re:well, not effortlessly

[MMC Monster]

RTF is definitely a microsoft product. In fact, a new version of the RTF format is created with every release of Microsoft Word. See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Text_Format

Re:well, not effortlessly

[Gideon Fubar]

.rm is not a workable format. AVI is simply a container, in which variously coded streams sit. rm is a complete audio/video codec package.

regardless, .rm's quality is by far inferior to any of the commonly used standards, and that's after (at least, i lost count..) 10 major software iterations.

Re:well, not effortlessly

[Gr8Apes]

Because there's a couple of pieces of the spec missing in MS's solution. Read this for a bit of background info on what multi-cast entails.

IIRC, MS fails to register, and works by flooding the network. The first part prevents utilizing multicast at the switch/router levels, thus limiting multicasting only to those machines on a single network segment. The second means you do not have any of the efficiencies of multicasting even on a LAN.

And I may not even have described all or the major flaws in how MS implemented it. 8+ years makes things fuzzy.

Re:well, not effortlessly

[LO0G]

Strangely enough, the first link in the search you used for "Dos isn't done.." is a refutation of that particular myth. One where the author went not only to the MS engineers who wrote DOS, but to Mitch Kapor of Lotus and several of the Lotus developers who were developing the product at the time.

"DOS ain't done 'til Lotus don't run" sounds catchy, but if the people who wrote DOS and the people who wrote Lotus 1-2-3 are to be believed, it didn't happen.

Re:well, not effortlessly

[Maxo-Texas]

It's amazing how what everyone in the PC group knew was true can be rewritten in twenty years. That's why I say how crazy it all seems.

There was absolutely no doubt about any of this back when it was going on.

Re:well, not effortlessly

[Maxo-Texas]

Actually there is a lot of good discussion in the comments below (including use of undocumented API's) in that post.

It's amazing how fast history becomes muddy and I have to concede that, given how much I see my friend's memories shift and remap events, my memories are suspect as well.

Re:well, not effortlessly

[bram]

Just give him an RTF and name it .doc.

That's what I have been doing whenever someone required an MS word doc for the last 10 years.

Re:well, not effortlessly

[tuxgeek]

I'd have to say that I'm in full agreement with your post, however MS is actually just a marketing company, not a software company. Their products are all crap, intended for profit margins and not innovation of the computing industry.

Years ago, I wrote applications using the win32 api. But I could never get my work to look as clean as theirs. I finally concluded that they must keep some special system api functions secret to maintain an edge on competitor's efforts.

Another example to add to my disgust for microsoft is when I used their backup software that came with winblows 95, to archive my work and data, later down the line when I was running winblows 98 or 2k and decided to access the archived data on those old CDs, "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that". WTF??? Those fucking assholes changed the backup format and skipped including any backwards compatibility. I opted to just throw out the unreadable disks rather than reinstalling that abortion of an OS (win95) just to recover the data contained on those old archive CDs.

Life has become much better since I migrated my life to Linux, and if I need to perform a compressed archive, at least tar will always work. But since DVD's became the archive medium of choice, there isn't much need for compressed archives.

lol words -1 troll for the fucking win

[Anonymous Coward]

I like to smack fat aspergers indians with ftying pans! I outsource their children to tokyo wheir they put drawing pins up their anuses and inject heroin and sarin gas into them!

Too much internet...

[oahazmatt]

It's official, I've been on the internet way too much. I saw "RTF Vs. OOXML" with just a quick glance and read it as some new, bizarre acronym like "ROFLCOPTOR".

Re:Too much internet...

[Anonymous Coward]

http://members.cox.net/pimpbot9000/roflcopter.gif

Re:Too much internet...

[jag7720]

RTF = Ralphing On Floor

Re:Too much internet...

[nschubach]

High on some illegal substance you might think:
Raid The Fucking Vorgon[s] Or Orangutan Xylophones Might Laugh!

Or when you go to start one of them high end raids and you see it it means:
Raiding The Fridge, Voices Off, Oreo Kisses My Lovely.

Slashdot browsing:
Really Taco, Fucking View Stories Or Old Xerces Maky Love

I had another one, but it was really cruel, began with Rape, the V was well related to that and it ended disturbingly.

Re:Too much internet...

[nine-times]

funny, I thought, "Read the f-ing OOXML?"

Draft OpenISO.org "Problem Report" entry

[jafoc]

Is this how an open standard is developed?

No.

Here's a copy of the draft OpenISO.org "Problem Report" entry for this issue:

Microsoft's attempt to essentially unilaterally dictate office document standards is an abuse of their dominant position

Problem description:

Normally standardization is conducted by means all interested parties participating in a discussion of the desired features, so that all interested parties have an essentially equal opportunity to develop products implementing the standard.

By contrast, OOXML is simply documentation of the document format that Microsoft's products already use, and there is no indication that Microsoft would intend to make the details about future versions of OOXML available to competitors before Microsoft is ready to release their own implementation of the new features for public beta testing.

Expected impact:

To the extent that OOXML is accepted as a standard, all of Microsoft's competitors will be encumbered with a permanent economic disadvantage.

Possible solution:

Reject all claims about OOXML in some way being a standard, and take legal action, on the basis of national and international competition law, against Microsoft as well as against Ecma and all other organizations which are guilty of aiding and abetting Microsoft's anticompetitive actions.

Re:Draft OpenISO.org "Problem Report" entry

[morgan_greywolf]

To be fair, ODF started out as a documentation of the 'StarOffice XML' format. And it still pretty much is, although changes were made late in the process to further ensure document portability and to improve multilingual support. OTOH, OOo will always follow the standard rather than define the standard. A standard isn't defined by one product, it is something that products follow.

I don't understand why this is so hard for people to understand.

Re:Draft OpenISO.org "Problem Report" entry

[jafoc]

To be fair, ODF started out as a documentation of the 'StarOffice XML' format.

True. And that is in fact a legitimate starting point for the process of developing a standard. Of course back when it was just the 'StarOffice XML' format, no-one insisted on pushing it down everyone's throat as an international standard. Rather, Sun got all interested parties together, and a real standard was developed by means of requesting and taking under consideration everyone's input on needed changes.

OOo will always follow the standard rather than define the standard. A standard isn't defined by one product, it is something that products follow.

Yes, exactly.

I don't understand why this is so hard for people to understand.

Effective propaganda: The "open" in OOXML's name together with the OOXML specification being called a "standard" by Ecma, etc. We all suffer from information overload and are not able to think though and reach the stage of true understanding regarding all issues. In the absence of any well-known credible and truly objective authorities on the issue, we should not be surprised by the effectiveness of Microsoft's propaganda.

Re:Draft OpenISO.org "Problem Report" entry

[velen]

Microsoft is the market leader in the office suite applications arena for a good reason. Their creativity cannot be stifled by a standards committee. However, this also means that they can't pretend to have an open standard as a file format when they aren't.

The only thing that needs to happen is to reject the idea of OOXML as a standard until Microsoft is able to demonstrate transparency and consistency across at least three or so releases of their office suite. PDF didn't become a standard overnight. It has matured over time. The same needs to happen with OOXML.

Re:Draft OpenISO.org "Problem Report" entry

[Frizzle Fry]

The real question is how did "O Penis O" ever seem like a good name for a site?

Re:Draft OpenISO.org "Problem Report" entry

[Anonymous Coward]

OTOH, OOo will always follow the standard rather than define the standard. A standard isn't defined by one product, it is something that products follow.

That's basically unadulterated bullshit. OpenOffice produces "ODF" files which are not compliant with the standard and have extended data.

OpenOffice is the defacto ODF "standard" despite what the committees say.

Re:Draft OpenISO.org "Problem Report" entry

[morgan_greywolf]

Care to provide citations, AC Troll? I can.

RTF Vs. OOXML

[Rob T Firefly]

I think I could beat OOXML, if I took a few weeks to train up with some old kung fu movies beforehand.

-- RTF

Re:RTF Vs. OOXML

[Anonymous Coward]

Be sure to rent the boxing ring yourself and call them a bunch of names. Wallow in your ego-driven angst for a while.

Re:RTF Vs. OOXML

[UdoKeir]

Maybe you could get Zed to train you.

Re:RTF Vs. OOXML

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad you're not a Ruby on Rails coder.

Help organize problem reports on OOXML

[Anonymous Coward]

It's definitely important that those who agree that OOXML is not a good standard should help organize a list of problems that can be easily seen by the members of the upcoming ISO OOXML ballot meeting in February 2008 and all the Internet in general.

OpenISO.org, an independent open organization much inspired by slashdot, is planning to include the issue of this post in the problem report document produces in its OpenISO.org Review of OOXML. OpenISO.org is asking for help to organize the comments of your country in a wiki at http://f29500.openiso.org./

Please have a look at all the problem reports at http://f29500.openiso.org/ and help to include more and organize the ones already included, even if only one or two. The more documented and organized the OOXML problems are for discussion in an easy accessible manner, the less likely it will be accepted as a standard.

ps: I'm not associated in any way with openiso.org, it just seems to be the right thing to do.

NNP vs. IHNRBS

[Anonymous Coward]

No-Niggers Protocol vs. the I Hate Niggers Real Bad System, the TCP vs. UDP of our era.

maybe they should merge RTF and OOXML

[circletimessquare]

call it ROTFL

Re:maybe they should merge RTF and OOXML

[Anonymous Coward]

V2.0:

ROTFLMXO

Re:maybe they should merge RTF and OOXML

[wanderingknight]

Rolling On The Floor Laughing My Xylophone Off?

Re:maybe they should merge RTF and OOXML

[TeknoHog]

One of my employers used a naming scheme for documents, so that the filename could tell about the intent, creation date, etc. of the text. Everything was saved as RTF to improve future compatibility.

Oddly, my proposal to name product manuals with .RTFM never took off.

The article talks about something else!

[bogaboga]

The headline says "RTF vs OOXML" so one would think that the writer is outlining the weaknesses and strengths of the two. But the linked article appears to show how the RTF failed to solve interoperability problems or concerns in its time.

My suggestion: Get a better title for the slashdot piece. How about "OOXML will not work just like RTF failed."

Re:The article talks about something else!

[$RANDOMLUSER]

Not exactly. TFA is saying that RTF was the de facto "format of file exchange" between word processors like Word and Word Perfect; and that if OOXML becomes the new medium of exchange that we have another generation of Microsoft-format-change-whim to look forward to.

planet/population rescue vs. 'living' in the dark

[Anonymous Coward]

no contest, really.

if the 'options' do not suit you, consider just following the corepirate nazi hypenosys story LIEn. anything of relevance is replaced almost instantly with pr ?firm? scriptdead mindphuking propaganda or 'celebrity' trivia 'foam'. meanwhile;

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071229/ap_on_sc/ye_climate_records;_ylt=A0WTcVgednZHP2gB9wms0NUE

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/31/opinion/31mon1.html?em&ex=1199336400&en=c4b5414371631707&ei=5087%0A

is it time to get real yet? A LOT of energy is being squandered in attempts to keep US in the dark. in the end (give or take a few 1000 years), the creators will prevail (world without end, etc...), as it has always been. the process of gaining yOUR release from the current hostage situation may not be what you might think it is. butt of course, most of US don't know, or care what a precarious/fatal situation we're in. for example; the insidious attempts by the felonious corepirate nazi execrable to block the suns' light, interfering with a requirement (sunlight) for us to stay healthy/alive. it's likely not good for yOUR health/memories 'else they'd be bragging about it? we're intending for the whoreabully deceptive (they'll do ANYTHING for a bit more monIE/power) felons to give up/fail even further, in attempting to control the 'weather', as well as a # of other things/events.

http://video.google.com/videosearch?hl=en&q=video+cloud+spraying

dictator style micro management has never worked (for very long). it's an illness. tie that with life0cidal aggression & softwar gangster style bullying, & what do we have? a greed/fear/ego based recipe for disaster. meanwhile, you can help to stop the bleeding (loss of life & limb);

http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/12/28/vermont.banning.bush.ap/index.html

the bleeding must be stopped before any healing can begin. jailing a couple of corepirate nazi hired goons would send a clear message to the rest of the world from US. any truthful look at the 'scorecard' would reveal that we are a society in decline/deep doo-doo, despite all of the scriptdead pr ?firm? generated drum beating & flag waving propaganda that we are constantly bombarded with. is it time to get real yet? please consider carefully ALL of yOUR other 'options'. the creators will prevail. as it has always been.

corepirate nazi execrable costs outweigh benefits
(Score:-)mynuts won, the king is a fink)
by ourselves on everyday 24/7

as there are no benefits, just more&more death/debt & disruption. fortunately there's an 'army' of light bringers, coming yOUR way. the little ones/innocents must/will be protected. after the big flash, ALL of yOUR imaginary 'borders' may blur a bit? for each of the creators' innocents harmed in any way, there is a debt that must/will be repaid by you/us, as the perpetrators/minions of unprecedented evile, will not be available. 'vote' with (what's left in) yOUR wallet, & by your behaviors. help bring an end to unprecedented evile's manifestation through yOUR owned felonious corepirate nazi glowbull warmongering execrable. some of US should consider ourselves somewhat fortunate to be among those scheduled to survive after the big flash/implementation of the creators' wwwildly popular planet/population rescue initiative/mandate. it's right in the manual, 'world without end', etc.... as we all ?know?, change is inevitable, & denying/ignoring gravity, logic, morality, etc..., is only possible, on a temporary basis. concern about the course of events that will occur should the life0cidal execrable fail to be intervened upon is in or

RIP George McDonald Fraser

[Anonymous Coward]

I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Flashman author George McDonald Fraser was found dead in his home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to historical fiction. Truly an English icon.

Acronyms in headlines?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, I was hoping for an article about ROTFL vs. LOL or maybe OMG vs. RTFM
C'mon... basic journalism 101 says the headlines should be understandable by a third grader. You can put the acronyms into the body (summary), but good grief not in the headline.
I have a vague idea about what OOXML is, but not RTF

Re:Acronyms in headlines?

[Anonymous Coward]

please hand in your geek card at the exit. thanks.

Re:Acronyms in headlines?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a vague idea about what OOXML is, but not RTF

This website is not meant for you. Go away.

Re:Acronyms in headlines?

[mcpkaaos]

I have a vague idea about what OOXML is, but not RTF

Imagine hell with more backslashes.

Standardize RTF first

[filbranden]

I think if Microsoft really wanted to promote interoperabillity they should standardize RTF first and then OOXML.

After all, RTF is here since Word '95 (and maybe even before), and as far as I can tell, it hasn't changed since. It's a stable format (which OOXML isn't at all). It's already supported by virtually all products on the market. It's text based, it's simple (contrary to the binary formats).

If Microsoft is really concerned about interoperabillity, they should have published the full specs of RTF and pushed for standardization a long time ago.

However, as they're pushing for the standardization of OOXML, an unstable format that even they don't implement, with dubious IP concerns, with unspecified features, I think that says a lot about what they're trying to accomplish, and interoperabillity it certainly isn't.

Re:Standardize RTF first

[Fast Thick Pants]

Microsoft's published RTF specs for a quite some time now -- the latest version of the spec is 1.9 and you can download it from Microsoft in your choice of binary .doc or MS-OOXML .docx, sorry no .rtf!

The spec is actually not bad, though the continued efforts to shoehorn in new features gets a little laughable. Here's an example of an RTF-reencoded XML tag from the spec:

{\*\xmlopen\xmlns0\xmlsdttpara{\xmlname Title}}}{\rtlch\fcs1 \af0 \ltrch\fcs0
\insrsid1978110 \hich\af0\dbch\af11\loch\f0 Atlas Shrugged}{\rtlch\fcs1 \af0
\ltrch\fcs0 \insrsid136785 {\*\xmlclose}}

As far as I know they've never tried to have RTF ratified by any standards body, but it's still very widely used. People have a lot of files named .doc around that are actually RTFs, and some word processors (AbiWord for one) actually use .doc-named RTFs as their "Word" format, since, having a spec, it's a lot easier to write than the binary .doc format. By design, old Word versions and non-Word software ignore any tags they don't understand, and I'd guess that most modern third-party RTF parsers and encoders are designed around the 2000 RTF spec (version 1.6) without all the new stuff.

Re:Standardize RTF first

[ozmanjusri]

If Microsoft is really concerned about interoperabillity, they should have published the full specs of RTF and pushed for standardization a long time ago.

Ask and ye shall receive. It was released in 1999, so it even meets your "long time ago" requirement.

One of the more amusing lines of the specification;

Because of the way Microsoft word processors implement tables, and the table-driven approach of many Microsoft RTF readers, it is very easy to write tables in RTF that will crash Microsoft word processors when you try to read the RTF. And of course, how much value there is in the specification for a format more than a decade obsolete, I'll leave as an exercise for the reader.

Re:Standardize RTF first

[Anonymous Coward]

It is important to remember that the whole point of TFA is that MS only publishes the documentation *after* they have implemented it, so there's no time for competition to come up with similar products in the same timeframe, MS is always ahead by definition. 'RTF is defined as whatever Word saves when you ask it to save as RTF.'

The documentation is available only in DOC or DOCX, why not in HTML or TXT or some international document standard like PDF or ODF?

From a comment in TFA, there seems to be a hidden list of previous versions:

"A while back Brian Jones, a Microsoft Office project manager, claimed good interoperability pedigree for Office applications since they can read and write "standards such as RTF and CSV". I took him to task over that one because neither of these is a standard; they are standins for standards. CSV is extremely unstable across versions and languages of Excel, and as far as I can tell is undocumented except to Microsoft developers. RTF is simply a representation of every version of Word. I took the trouble a while ago to compile this list, since such a list does not exist online from Microsoft:

* March 1987: An article by Nancy Andrews of Microsoft.
* 1.0 1987: Word 3.0 for Macintosh
* 1.0 June 1992: Word for Windows v2
* 1.1 Unknown, unavailable
* 1.2 Unknown, unavailable
* 1.3 January 1994: Word v6
* 1.4 September 1995: Word v7 (Word 95)
* 1.5 April 1997: Word v8 (Word 97)
* 1.6 May 1999: Word v9 (Word 2000)
* 1.7 August 2001: Word v10 (Word 2002)
* 1.8 April 2004: Word v11 (Word 2003)
* 1.9 January 2007: Word v12 (Word 2007)

The worst part about this "standard" is the license: it is packed in a Windows-only executable package and is licensed for noncommercial use on Windows machines only.
# posted by Blogger Sean : Thu Dec 20, 04:33:00 PM EST

Re:Standardize RTF first

[Fast Thick Pants]

The worst part about this "standard" is the license: it is packed in a Windows-only executable package and is licensed for noncommercial use on Windows machines only.

Not that I want to sing their praises, but at least with version 1.9 they've stopped the idiotic practice of wrapping the spec in an .exe download. I haven't been able to spot the noncommecial restriction anywhere, but I wouldn't be surprised. There's certainly nothing akin to the royalty-free license grant that we have in writing for ODF.

Re:Standardize RTF first

[bcrowell]

Yeah, I think the article is a little off base about RTF. It's not IP-encumbered. As you pointed out, you can download the spec from MS. There's a ton of OSS implementations. There are perl modules that read and write it. There's an O'Reilly book on it (free short version of it here).

Okay, so RTF changes when a new version of Word comes out. That means that, e.g., it shouldn't be used for archiving government documents, and it's not suitable as a universal format for people to collaborate on extremely complex documents using different software. It doesn't mean RTF is useless or evil. I write fiction, and RTF turns out to be a very useful lingua franca for magazines that accept electronic submissions. For a fiction manuscript, you don't need anything very fancy --- basically just the ability to underline, and put a header on each page. RTF works just fine for that, and I'm really, really glad that RTF is the de facto standard for this purpose, and not doc.

It's unfortunate that OOo's RTF support is so horrible. E.g., if you save a document from OOo in RTF format, open it, edit it again, and save it again, you lose the whole document. Yeesh!

Re:Standardize RTF first

[pacinpm]

Microsoft's published RTF specs for a quite some time now I remember I tried to implement RTF reading once. Spec says one must use lowercase but RTF from Word had uppercase letters for tags. I decided I won't waste my time.

RTF What?

[Shinmizu]

RTF? RTF what? What am I supposed to be reading to eliminate my ignorance of some set of operations?

Re:RTF What?

[kvezach]

The abbreviation's actually short for "Raze the F...er", since that's about the only thing you can do with the format.

Re:RTF What?

[Anonymous Coward]

just RTF: Read The Fucking - it is some sort of existential observation porn exercise?

National Standards Bodies

[Marcion]

While making a new standards body like OpenISO sounds like a good idea, I don't want to rain on that parade.

However, I think there is also a problem with the national standards bodies. They can vary from a formal technical committees answerable to democratically elected governments according to what their country needs, through to a ragtag bunch of nobodies who can dictate whatever they want according to their specific corporate interests. I think ISO needs to start with itself and standardise how national bodies work.

Also I think that if you are unhappy with the decision your national body made, then you need to either seek to get on it (or make a group that raises funds to get one of you on it), or setup a competing national standards organisation, get to work, and then try to replace the old one as ISO's National standards body for your country.

Re:National Standards Bodies

[multipartmixed]

> I think ISO needs to start with itself and standardise how national bodies work.

Wow, I think that might be the most insightful comment I've read on slashdot all year!

Wes

Office 2007 not even compliant

[Bayesela]

On top of OOXML being developed in a closed environment, MS Office is not even using the proposed ECMA or ISO spec, they including all types of tie-ins. This article explains more: not even compliant

OOD has doomed us all to bad standards

[thogard]

Computers do Input, Output, Processing and Storage. Its been that way for more than a half centuy.
At some point people thought it would be cool if that wasn't the case and dreamed up lots of crud to put in text books sold to college students and they made lots of money but hasn't changed a thing.

It still doesn't fix the problem that a word processor has an internal model of what the user typed. Its job is to output that in a way that is consistent with what it's showing the user and what the user told it to do. Now for some odd reason a large group of people come along and say "we want magic" and expect the input/output and storage models to be disassociated. How is that supposed to work? Remapping input? More levels of indirection? It sill doesn't fix the core problem.

Re:OOD has doomed us all to bad standards

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, read up on typesetting. I can write a TeX [or LaTeX] document using syntax that is decades old, and it will render the way I want on any platform that has the open source freely available tools installed.

The fact that Office [and OO.o] are worthless for consistent looking documents doesn't mean that computers as a whole can't do the job. Just use better tools.

Office suites are meant for quick and flashy documents [e.g. clipart havens]. Typesetting tools are meant for consistent reproducible professional documents.

Re:OOD has doomed us all to bad standards

[thogard]

I have TeX documents from 1985 that still render the same way. LaTeX documents from then do not always render the same way they used to.

Re:OOD has doomed us all to bad standards

[PPH]

It still doesn't fix the problem that a word processor has an internal model of what the user typed. Its job is to output that in a way that is consistent with what it's showing the user and what the user told it to do.

That would be nice. But it would be even better if the word processor generated the same output each time the user entered the same thing. Or, at leat give the user a heads up that this is going to change. Microsoft doesn't meet this simple requirement.

The days of PCs being stand-alone boxes sitting on peoples desks are long gone. That output you speak of needs to go somewhere else as the input of another process. In order to do that, the input and output schemas need to be the same across both space (between systems) and time (not change unilaterally).

What computers do very well is to perform repetitive tasks consistently. For an up front investment into encoding a process, savings can be realized for each subsequent repetition. If we have to keep revisiting this initial encoding, the savings is diminished.

Reference Apps are nice in the Real World.

[LWATCDR]

I have worked on industry standards before. Writing spec is just half the battle. You then have the problem with implementation. Every company will implement it in slightly different ways. You would be surprised on how many ways there are to read a spec! Then you get in a yelling match over who is actually doing it correctly.
When you have a reference application to test with then you have less yelling.

Re:Reference Apps are nice in the Real World.

[dvice_null]

The problem usually is that spec is not complite. I admit that it is very hard if not impossible to think all alternatives. That is why the system must be as public as possible.

And I agree that it is a good idea to implement a reference implementation for the spec.

Re:Reference Apps are nice in the Real World.

[Fred_A]

The problem usually is that spec is not complite. I admit that it is very hard if not impossible to think all alternatives. That is why the system must be as public as possible.

And I agree that it is a good idea to implement a reference implementation for the spec. Beyond completeness, there is also legibility. For anyone who has worked in telecommunications, the CCITT (now called something else) docs were absolutely horrible to read. At the time discovering the RFCs was real a breath of fresh air. They were sooo much clearer.
They both had the same problem of sometimes not covering all cases but at least it was easy to parse most RFCs.

A lot of the ISO docs I've seen (admittedly I haven't seen many) were also quite horrible to read.

So IMO if you want a clean implementation, write a clean documentation instead of a twisting mess of little paragraphs (with grues).

Re:Reference Apps are nice in the Real World.

[LWATCDR]

I agree but you wouldn't believe how people interpret specs!
An example was when a type of document data was made "optional" in the spec I was working on. One of the vendors programs locked up if the data file had that data in it! They thought that optional they didn't need to handle it at all instead of just ignoreing it or not using it their export.
Yes it was stupid on their part but without any reference program it become he said she said.

ISO or ANSI

[Grampaw Willie]

we must have ISO or ANSI write the standard and set up compliance tests for RTF and without input from Ms because Ms needs to take a good licking for their nasty behavior

Re:ISO or ANSI

[Anonymous Coward]

So .doc and an XML walk into a bar, they scoped out the scene... they saw a hot RTF and OOXML by themselves. .doc walks over to the OOXML and says... ASL? OOXML was like.. "WTF? Get away from me... As... If"

I'm sorry, I don't get your point.

[argent]

There's more than one input and output.

The input and output on the screen and keyboard are part of the processing from the point of view of the storage.

The input and output of the file storage are part of the processing from the point of view of the user.

User - I/O - Processing - I/O - Storage

In addition there's a third I/O interface for printing, and a forth for online publishing.

There's no reason that the storage format needs to be tightly coupled to the display format. And, also, an editor doesn't have an internal model of "what the user typed", it has an internal model of a document and updates that according to the user's commands. In Word, that internal format doesn't even match what the user sees very well... there's no such thing as "nesting" or a "list" internally, for example, there's just a set of styles and rules about what paragraphs follow each other and lists are created and manipulated by dynamically updating the paragraph styles and next-paragraph rules.

If Word can manage to take this and generate nested lists on the screen and in HTML, and accept user's requests to change nesting depths and go through and update all the paragraph styles to match, there's no reason it can't do the same thing in its storage format.

Re:I'm sorry, I don't get your point.

[thogard]

Output on different devices is what a word processor does. Other wise its "process" step wouldn't be anything at all. And the 1950's model doesn't consider "storage" part of the I/O model but modern sanity sort of would imply it unless its direct memory or object dump.

Words storage model is odd. It doesn't match the input model but is sort of based on the output model assuming line printers with loads of hacks to make it work with modern printers. As far as I know its been that way since I was using Word (for Unix on a 3b2) in 1987.

Re:I'm sorry, I don't get your point.

[argent]

Output on different devices is what a word processor does. Other wise its "process" step wouldn't be anything at all.

A word processor is an editor, what it primarily does is modify a structured document according to the user's commands. A given document may never be output in a printed form, anywhere. What you seem to be describing is a text processor, like *roff or TeX, which really does convert user input containing markup commands directly to formatted output.

Personally I prefer the text processor approach, myself.

WTF?

[walterbyrd]

> Now for some odd reason a large group of people come along and say "we want magic" and expect the input/output and storage models to be disassociated. How is that supposed to work?

So you saying that standards can not possibly work? That people want "magic?"

Hate to break it to you, but standards already work. Consider ASCII. Also ODF is already incorporated in several word processors.

Of course input/output and storage models can be disassociated, it's done all of the time.

Re:WTF?

[thogard]

Standards don't work universally. Thats why there are so many of them. ASCII worked so well in the early days. And then there are the hacks.

ODF only works for a majority of documents but most people involved with that standard can create something that is legal but won't render the same way on many platforms. You can repeat that for HTML, PDF, GIF, JPG etc.

With a word process you can store either the input, output, memory or processing. Word Perfect up to 5.1 stored input (with hacks for specific printers). TeX stores a reflection of the internal processing model. PDF stores the output model. Word stores its storage model.

Re:WTF?

[huge]

Hate to break it to you, but standards already work. Consider ASCII.

Indeed, consider ASCII. Let's not forget ASCII "extensions" like CP437, CP850, Windows-1252 and others. Some of them are more compatible than others. And let's not get into other encodings like EBCDIC, which are still more common than most people think.

Standard part of ASCII only defines 95 printable characters and 33 control characters. That said, it has provided good foundation for others to embrace-and-extend.

It's open once published

[Russ Nelson]

There are two kinds of vendor standards -- the one in which the vendor publishes what they've done, and the other in which the vendor publishes what they will do. This article contends it's the first. Is OOXML the first or the second? We'll see.

Re:It's open once published

[jopsen]

the one in which the vendor publishes what they've done,

This type of document is not a standard it called a documentation. OOXML is not a standard it's a documentation of MS office's default format...
You can also find a documentation of HTML on MSDN, this is not a standard either it's a documentation of the HTML implementation in Internet Explorer.

and the other in which the vendor publishes what they will do

This type of document is usually called a standard. While it's true that ODF started as a documentation of StarOffice XML, it's worth noting that ODF went through a long standardization process and have been changed by many parties. Including Microsoft!

Re:It's open once published

[andruk]

So, tell me, did you know what MS was going to do *before* Office 2007 came out? I mean specifics, not "they said they would open up their upgrade to .doc, which is called OOXML", I mean, could you have implemented OOXML *before* they came out with it?

I thought not.

And that, lady and gentlemen /. readers, is why it is not an open standard. It is a standard that will have Microsoft's competitors following Microsoft every step of the way for another ten years, anticompetitive measures completely evident.

Polar Oposites. M$ Must Be Destroyed.

[twitter]

To be fair, ODF started out as a documentation of the 'StarOffice XML' format. And it still pretty much is

That would be fair if M$ Word were developed in public as free software. It's not, which is why RTF, DOC and now OOXML (aka MSXML) were not and will not ever be standards that other people can use. They never were and never will be fully documented. The MSXML saga is proof positive that M$ has no intentions of playing nice, is still at war with reasonable standards and will to commit any crime to win. If you want a change just use software, where everything really is documented.

comma delimited data

[Grampaw Willie]

comma delimited data, for example

as i noted in the other post we need ISO and ANSI to write the spec and set up the acceptance test

how many foos i have falling over commas and or quotes that are enclosed within quoted text -- or who cannot write a number properly

AGGRAVATING! these foos need to get a big fat F on their report card and join Hillary in re-hab

Re: New File Formats

[TaoPhoenix]

Will the next version decide to save as ".doc9"?

Between the file format change and the GUI change it feels like entirely different App co-branded by MS.

One other type

[Tony]

And the one that Microsoft typically uses: the standard which is never published.

MS-Office has been called a "standard" for so long, people believe it. And they conflate a "standard" piece of software with a document "standard."

In any kind of engineering, there is only one true standard-- that which is agreed-upon by the manufacturers and/or engineers themselves. Bridge architects will never use a non-standard size bolt, nor a non-standard metal. Why? Because the weld strength is too important. Because the dielectric interaction of different metals and alloys results in a weaker bridge. Because lives depend on it.

Corporations who push their own format as a "standard" harm the industry. If they never publish their formats, or publish a bowdlerized version of their standard (MS-Office 2007 doesn't even conform to the OOXML specification as published), they are selling their customers a trojan horse.

It's not the standard, stupids

[Anonymous Coward]

This whole "document standards war" is, once again, a phyrric war started by FOSSies. Much like Browser War II, or The Kernel War, or the "TEH MIKKKR0$$$L0TH IS A TEH MONOPOLULISK!!!!" meme. It's just something the FOSSies do which accomplishes nothing, and Microsoft simply shrugs off the attack and continues making successful software.

The FOSSies need to take a long hard look in the mirror, and ask themselves why that is. Is it really Microsoft's fault that Teh Lunix only has a .63% market share? Really? Can you honestly say MS is somehow holding consumers at gunpoint to force Teh Lunix to have a user base which is below the statistical margin of error?

Or is the truth simply something the FOSSies would rather not believe, which is that consumers actually prefer Microsoft's products? I used to hate MS Office, but at my current job I had to actually do a bit of document support (I had only done nuts-and-bolts application support for MS Office in past jobs). But once I understood the 'logic' used in the application's design, I actually liked it. Sure, it's not amazingly easy to do stuff without that knowledge, but once you understand how the application does and doesn't work, it's really pretty good.

Now with Windows... most people want to be able to have a platform where they can just pick up whatever software they impulse buy, be it at Best Buy, or CostCo, or WalMart, or wherever. Most people don't care about what OS they use exactly, they just want it to work. But the FOSSies keep saying "oh well, you just run Teh Lunix, and spend a few hours getting the video to display, then a few hours getting networking to work, and a few hours manually changing config files so you can get WINE to work... and then you can replace Windows! Well you know what? An average user doesn't want to spend ten hours setting up Teh Lunix, and probably would have no idea ever where to start in the first place. But that's because they don't have an irrational hate of all things Microsoft fueling them to go to those lengths- they just take the path of least resistance, which is using Windows, because it just works. And they don't even have to spend 30 mintues installing it, but can if they want to... and it will just work when it's done.

Finally, there's the "Browser War II". Which is over... a web browser. Which is just a window you open to go to a web page. Excitement. Most computer users don't even understand what a browser is. They call it "the internet". So are you honestly expecting anyone to get fired up about using a browser which doesn't come with the OS? And more importantly... are you really trying to say a modern operating system should ship without a web browser?

The problem with FOSSies is they don't care about choice, because if they did, they would stop complaining about the choices consumers are making every single day. What these Stallmanistas are really about is forcing their own choices onto consumers, since consumers don't care about FOSS or many other pieces of software. Opera can't even beat Firefox, but now they want to legislate Microsoft into distributing Opera? That's insane.

My advise to Teh FOSSies: stop worrying about what Microsoft is doing, and focus on what you guys are doing. Make software which people actually seek out and use. If you guys actually made Open Orifice into something desirable, maybe people would use it. Work on the UI design and functionality. If your software is SO good that it can ACTUALLY compete with MS Office... then worry about your standard.

But this strategy of trying to force your own standard onto Microsoft is really kind of a failure. You guys need to stop trying to make the tail wag the dog.

Re:It's not the standard, stupids

[kismet666]

Well put, I think its hypocritcal and unconstructive to try to undermine Microsoft through the courts, legislation, and standards bodies. All of these underhanded tactics will come back to haunt FOSS, IBM, and everyone else using them because new competitors will adopt the same tactics rather than creating something truly better than the leading technology. These are dangerous precedents that hinder inovation and creativity.

Re:It's not the standard, stupids

[0xdeadbeef]

I came here to ridicule the people who tagged this article "flamebait", who, in their delicate minds, confuse righteous anger and unabashed criticism with meaningless name-calling. The article is factual and its point is razor sharp. Since when are we worried about hurting Microsoft's self-esteem?

Now, my post and the above is more accurately accessed as "flamebait". His point is lost inside a wall of meandering text, which is really just a a vehicle for his ineffectual expression of contempt for "FOSSies". Here's some advice - don't hide like you're afraid of losing your precious karma, and don't be so stupidly wrong. If you want evidence of consumer choices and Microsoft's growing irrelevance, look at the list here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/pc/

Re:It's not the standard, stupids

[zish]

It's a lot less about 'FOSSies' mentality that you think.

It's not about forcing a standard onto Microsoft. It's more about having a standard with publicly available documentation that anyone can adopt or use. Having Microsoft (or any private entity for that matter) be the primary controller of a standard will definitely create a climate where Microsoft gets the upper hand. This is the entire reason that standards consortiums are created. I, personally, would have no issue if Microsoft were to create a standards consortium for it's OOXML, as long as other organizations could be directly involved as well. Anything less is definitely anti-competitive.

To me, it makes no sense to force a proprietary format, or an 'open standard' that is controlled by a single private organization on the general public. One could make the argument that the standard may be created without Microsoft's involvement. The unfortunate problem is that any standard created this way wouldn't be adopted. Make no mistake, Microsoft has the market share, and this is almost entirely due to the fact that many new computers come pre-installed with Windows/Office (This is also the reason that Vista will become the OS leader despite it's many shortcomings). All Microsoft has to do is not adopt the open standard, and push it's own formats.

Imagine, for instance, if you had to purchase wrenches and screwdrivers of different form-factors for each and every different car manufacturer. Or more appropriately, what if there was no HTML standard? Imagine having to purchase software (or an API/Protocol Stack) for each internet document server out there.

Re:It's not the standard, stupids

[Anonymous Coward]

I mostly agree with what you've said, but using phrases like "Teh Lunix" or "M$" or "Micro$oft Winblows" or my favorite "Internet Exploder" work against your argument. When you use those terms you come off like a rabid teenager. The people who come in to the post disagreeing with you will be insulted, and the people who are undecided/in between will disregard you as a fanboy or idealogue. It alienates the people who could be swayed by your thoughts on the subject. I guess that would be ok if the only thing you wanted to do was to preach to the choir, but in a real discussion the point is to exchange ideas with people who have a different viewpoint than you. I wish it would just stop.

Also, it isn't even clever. Do the people who write "M$" every time they mention Microsoft really think they're being funny or witty by calling attention to the fact that Microsoft has a lot of money?

Re:It's not the standard, stupids

[Anonymous Coward]

It's more about having a standard with publicly available documentation that anyone can adopt or use.

And again, that's my point. Rather than actually making a product which competes with Microsoft... you are harping on "open standards". But you've failed to not only define WHY consumers should even care about open standards... but more importantly you can't even convince consumers to care.

If your idea is so great... why aren't consumers purchasing your products? That's the battle you guys need to win. Stop taking your wars to the courts: take them to the marketplace, where they belong.

Nobody is "forcing" a proprietary standard, aside from MS Office's customers. Why? Because they don't care that MS Office is the only application which will read that standard... because they are only going to buy MS Office. So you have two choices: either create an alternative which is ACTUALLY competition (sorry chaps, but OO.o is not competition), or else enlightent MS Office users why an open standard would somehow make them like MS Office even more. If you can't do that... it means your idea isn't all that useful.

You guys aren't trying to improve computing, you are just trying to force MS to do as you, through a standards body, dictate. Consumers see no value in that (since there is none), and that's why you fail.

Re:It's not the standard, stupids

[Divebus]

If you filter the A/C's rant, there's a point of view in there which essentially says "just follow what Microsoft wants you to do". That's fine if you want stagnation of capabilities and to pay through the nose for the privilege.

Example, the Browser War was more than just a browser - it was hijacking the Internet Ecosystem which was supposed to be open and available to all. Microsoft saw open standard browsers and servers, particularly with Java, as a mortal threat to their platform.

To counteract, Microsoft developed IE and IIS to be a client-server relationship instead of a stateless browser as intended. Tools were widely distributed to create web sites for that system which were wholly incompatible with anything else. The goal was for anyone NOT using a complete Microsoft chain of technology to see a blank page on the Internet.

They almost pulled it off. The result was IE gained market dominance and, with the exception of exploits and treachery of completely hijacked computers, no other technical advances in browsers came about for many years. The fly in the ointment was they didn't have server dominance. Had they been able to overcome Apache, you can bet we'd be paying Microsoft for every page view on the Internet.

That's why we shouldn't just do what Microsoft says.

Re:It's not the standard, stupids

[Anonymous Coward]

"Do the people who write "M$" every time they mention Microsoft really think they're being funny or witty by calling attention to the fact that Microsoft has a lot of money? "

No, it is so the masses don't confuse MS with the other huge corporation, Apple. You see, even though Apple is a corporation, they aren't out to make any money. They prefer to make ranibows and ponies instead of cash, and earn karma instead of salaries.

Re:It's not the standard, stupids

[Anonymous Coward]

Well put, I think its hypocritcal and unconstructive to try to undermine Microsoft through the courts, legislation, and standards bodies.

Yeah, because MS would never employ any of those tactics to undermine anyone else. Nor would they force the MS tax on anyone who didn't want their crap OS. Nor, when you've bought a box with MS on it, would they ever provide anything less than their full, re-installable operating system on the supplied CDs. You see, they just haven't got the marketing power to force such fair practices on their sub-pushers.

Nor would they turn their backs on illegal distribution in Chine, while forcing USians to put up with their verification shit.

Fuck the bastards -- they're all paid, professional liars and always will be.

Re:It's not the standard, stupids

[Drinking Bleach]

I don't even know why he's harping on Lunix. I can't imagine that a significant amount of people would actually want to use a Commodore 64.

Well...

[fitten]

Having been involved in two standards bodies, those bodies found enormous benefit to having reference implementations being built at the same time the standards were being developed. It certainly helps drive out issues during the standardization process that would otherwise/sometimes make the standard unusable.

Granted, what Microsoft is doing may not be a 'reference implementation' but still... there are benefits to doing *some* implementation in parallel with standardization.

Re:Well...

[Anonymous Coward]

Granted, what Microsoft is doing may not be a 'reference implementation' but still... there are benefits to doing *some* implementation in parallel with standardization.

There is no benefit in what Microsoft is doing. Microsoft does the *sole* implementation of its internal *documentation* of its secret next version of OOXML, and call that a "standard". And because of that, when MS decides to publish its documentation after releasing its next version of Word, it will be months/years ahead of the competition. And this documentation will not even be a standard, because it will not have been discussed by the interested parties or made available to them beforehand being published!!! It's only a documentation of past developments made by Microsoft. This document is only a "standard" _because_ Microsoft is the *only one* to implement it (since they gave no chance to anyone else to implement too and point out the issues). And because of that, Microsoft has the power to destroy the competition trying to follow its internal documentation.

There would be benefits only if Microsoft was discussing the next version of OOXML in public in a public standards body (which is not the case), so that any competing products could implement the standard at the same time and help drive out issues. Only now there would be *some* implementation worth the name in parallel with *standardization*. The standard is a standard because every interested party agreed that the standard should be followed since there is not outstanding issue to any of them.

As TFA puts: "Looking at this long history of standards abuse by Microsoft, in the file format arena and elsewhere, I'm drawn to take a broader view of this controversy. It is not really a battle between ODF and OOXML. It isn't even really a battle between OOXML and ISO. It is, in the end, a battle between having document standards and not having them. Microsoft is trying to dumb down the concept of standards and interoperability to a point where these concepts are meaningless and ineffective. This is not because they want to support standards more easily in their products. No, it is because they do not want standards at all.

Remember, standards bring interoperability, the ability to try out new tools and techniques, the ability to migrate, the ability to chose among alternatives, the ability even to run non-Microsoft products. If standards are meaningless and ineffective, then the incumbent' vendor lock-in will win every time. At that point, isn't it convenient for them to have a monopoly in operating systems and productivity applications? This, in my opinion, is the essence of Novell's 2004 complaint, Opera's present complaint, and the ongoing file format debate. Microsoft's monopoly power and the resulting network effects have lead to a relationship with standards where they win by winning, by drawing, or even by cheating so much that they discredit the system."

Because of that, as someone involved in standard bodies, I believe it is extremely important to point out to everyone else in those bodies these tactics used by Microsoft to rig the standardization processes.

RTF & XML's late nite out

[Anonymous Coward]

So .doc and an XML walk into a bar, they scoped out the scene... they saw a hot RTF and OOXML by themselves. .doc walks over to the RTF and says... ASL? and RTF was like.. "WTF? Get away from me... As... If"

not just competitors, but users

[fermion]

I wish that MS would come up with some format that was standard, easily implemented, and provided some level of predictability. It would mean that I might start using their office products again. The problem is that every version has radical changes in design, and even similar versions can cause problems. Then then there is the issue of the formats holding active content, so MS then limits what can be done with the files. It is way to limiting. I suppose that if I just wrote memos, or had a spreadsheet I needed to work on everyday, or needed to fool people with a presentation, MS OOXML would be fine. But I need to have reliably get access to stuff a from a couple years ago, work on any machine I happen to find, and put book chapters together. With RTF, ODF and TeX I can always download and install what I need within 10 minutes. I had a case the other day where a file was brought in using the latest format, and the only way to deal with it was to upgrade the license for hundreds of dollars. If OOXML was open, I would at least be able to download something that would allow some level of functionality.

But given the MS of embrace and extend, I must resign myself to a world in which MS products are just too unreliable to use for real work of any significant magnitude. I know that RTF is not sufficient to make the fancy memos people like, but it does seem to work.

raise cain then

[Grampaw Willie]

we need a document format that is both simple and open so that documents can easily be exchanged

clearly this CANNOT be trusted to a corporation; it has to be owned publicly.

HTML might be used, but while HTML is fine for browser documents it lacks some features needed for print format.

PDF is the exact opposite, it prints perfect but browses poorly and requires specialized compilers to build documents.

and so at least for now there is still a place for something like .rtf

but we need an open standard for .rtf and we need a certification test so that vendor products can be evaluated and given a pass/fail grade

Re:raise cain then

[Grampaw Willie]

so that documents can easily be exchanged

Remember: we need to exchange across time as well as between vendors' systems

I see this as the role of .RTF .rtf should be a sort of frozen format: unchanging from vendor to vendor and from year to year

The openness of the process is the key

[DrYak]

To be fair, ODF started out as a documentation of the 'StarOffice XML' format. And it still pretty much is, although changes were made late in the process to further ensure document portability and to improve multilingual support.

But the key point is that the whole process was open.
The ODF standard was designed by an comitee (OASIS), where several of the various office suite maker collaborate.
The procedure has been openly documented and everyone was able to know what was being done.
The standard was available "in advance" of the products, not the other way around. The standard will be followed by the various maker as you said.

The critics made to microsoft in TFA are that Microsoft is designing the standard alone without consulting the concurrence or even letting them know what they are doing.
The next iteration of OOXML is probably going to be made available "afterward" : they're going to first build MSOffice 14 and then publish "What we've done new in MSOffice 2010" or some other king of list of modification they did (notice past tense) to the standart. As you say, it's the product which will define de standard.

Yes, in both case the standard are published.
Yes, in both case they started life as internal representation of specific softwares.

BUT, OOXML is still an internal representation of word, and is best defined as "whatever the next version of word spills when you hit "Save" ", if Office change, OOXML will change with nobody knowing it in advance and being able to take part into the process. Want to make cross-operating software ? Please wait until Microsoft takes their next product to the market and makes it mind about what they'll throw next into it. Too bad that this will introduce delays into your own product.

The "standard" is still a moving target, the only difference with reverse engineering is that nobody needs to decypher cryptic binary data but only read 1700 pages, appart from that it's the same "play catch up".

WHEREAS ODF has been beated into a standard by a body where different vendors/makers could give their opinion and everyone can be informed of potential modification of the standard as it's a public procedure.
Want to take part in the development of the next standard ? You can !
Want to write software compatible with it ? Just stick to what is published in the ISO standard no need to track a single specific vendor and it's proprietary product.

ODF may be a bad standard for some people but it's still an OPEN standard, as in "the procedure of the creation of this standard was open".
OOXML is just a "we let you read the text we print to document what we've thrown in Office 2010" closed standard.

I don't understand why this is so hard for people to understand.

Yup. I agree with you.
Must probably all the noise comming from Microsoft's marketing department "But see, our is a standard too : we publish the specs too !!!"

You need a montage!

[spun]

You wouldn't even need a few weeks if you used a proper training montage. Those only take like five minutes.

Some tools get it right

[blueZ3]

Just not Word.

Ask anyone in publishing or anyone who writes for a living what tool they use and there's little chance that they're going to tout the advantages of Word. Word is borked in so many ways, from a writer's point of view, that it's hard to know where the start when cataloging the problems. You can begin with the broken tokening used in lists, move to the Master Documents "feature" and finish up with the fact that what's displayed on the screen not only differs depending on which computer you're viewing it on, but it isn't even the same as what's printed. (Trust me, you never EVER want to have to try and fiddle page breaking in Word, where the breaks shown on screen are seemingly unrelated to the way the pages break when output to the printer.

A "real" writing tool either completely divorces the content and presentation (a la TeX) or presents on-screen an EXACT representation of what will be printed (for example, FrameMaker). Word tries to do the second, but fails. Miserably.

RTFM 'against' OOXML

[nautsch]

OOXML is defective by design

Re:RTFM 'against' OOXML

[harlows_monkeys]

That was thoroughly torn apart last time it was posted here. One example of a fatal problem with it: the author edits the XML of a spreadsheet and breaks it, and then tries to blame this on OOXML. News flash: the exact same problem happens with ODF, and with every other XML format in the world when you edit it so as to make it no longer follow the schema for whatever type of document it is. Make the by-hand edit actually following the spec, and it works fine.

If OOXML is so bad, how come opponents have to resort to purposefully corrupting files, and other underhanded tricks, to argue against it? Why can't they stick to non-FUD arguments?

Re:RTFM 'against' OOXML

[belmolis]

That's not an accurate description. The point that article makes about the spreadsheet is that OOXML distributes information all over the place so that to make the simple change of replacing a formula in a cell with a constant it is necessary to edit multiple files. The problem is not that you can't make changes inconsistent with the schema - it is that the schema is poorly designed.

Furthermore, the spreadsheet example is only one of several cases discussed, so even if you were to rebut it successfully the article would still contain a valid critique.

Bobby Weir?

[Anonymous Coward]

ratdog!

Healtcare Example was:Reference Apps

[Anonymous Coward]

Very true. That's why with openEHR http://www.openehr.org/ every change was modeled in real software.

Reference Implementation

[Anonymous Coward]

What an interesting idea. Someone on contract for Europe writes a reference application to read both ODF and the Microsoft format, and Europe says, okay, any word processor that default saves documents readable in either of these formats is acceptable for interface with all of our member governments. Of course, Word 2007 would not pass, unless it used the ODF plugin. When Microsoft issues Word 2009, Word 2007 is still unacceptable, and the new version of their format is unacceptable until a reference application is built. And if the reference application is open-source, any organization can use it, and not discriminate at all between the formats.

How to advocate free software

[Anonymous Coward]

twitter, please read this carefully. Following this advice will make Slashdot a better place for everyone, including yourself.

• As a representative of the Linux community, participate in mailing list and newsgroup discussions in a professional manner. Refrain from name-calling and use of vulgar language. Consider yourself a member of a virtual corporation with Mr. Torvalds as your Chief Executive Officer. Your words will either enhance or degrade the image the reader has of the Linux community.
• Avoid hyperbole and unsubstantiated claims at all costs. It's unprofessional and will result in unproductive discussions.
• A thoughtful, well-reasoned response to a posting will not only provide insight for your readers, but will also increase their respect for your knowledge and abilities.
• Always remember that if you insult or are disrespectful to someone, their negative experience may be shared with many others. If you do offend someone, please try to make amends.
• Focus on what Linux has to offer. There is no need to bash the competition. Linux is a good, solid product that stands on its own.
• Respect the use of other operating systems. While Linux is a wonderful platform, it does not meet everyone's needs.
• Refer to another product by its proper name. There's nothing to be gained by attempting to ridicule a company or its products by using "creative spelling". If we expect respect for Linux, we must respect other products.
• Give credit where credit is due. Linux is just the kernel. Without the efforts of people involved with the GNU project , MIT, Berkeley and others too numerous to mention, the Linux kernel would not be very useful to most people.
• Don't insist that Linux is the only answer for a particular application. Just as the Linux community cherishes the freedom that Linux provides them, Linux only solutions would deprive others of their freedom.
• There will be cases where Linux is not the answer. Be the first to recognize this and offer another solution.

From http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/docs/HOWTO/Advocacy

Re:How to advocate free software

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot would also be a better place if you would stop posting here. For fucks sake get a life.

ODF new ISO standard?

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought ODF is the new document standard according to ISO. Did they still not make any official decision for ODF yet? Why would anyone still want OOXML? I thought it was a pretty clear decision. Is there something I don't know?

better stamped than not stamped

[nguy]

I'd rather have a rubber stamped version of Microsoft's office formats than no version at all: pathetic as ECMA may be, ECMA does force some additional disclosures and documentation, and it fixes a version for a while.

Of course, people need to keep in mind that an ECMA rubber stamp isn't the same as a traditional ISO/ANSI standard and it doesn't make the format "open". But with that caveat in mind, it's still better than nothing.

One doc type to rule them all

[failedlogic]

Food for thought: I was hoping someone would come out with one document type to rule them all. It would be kind of nice if web pages could run from 'integrated' document like a PDF which, would adjust itself based on screen res. You still have your master document, and have your app do all the background code (but there could be add-ons for the language like Latex so you can add technical fonts for math).

If this were to become standard, we could have simpler web-pages, a standard document type with WYSIWYG compatibility, embedded fonts and changeable style sheets (especially for the visually impaired). It would also be nice since *one* language could help create portable, always "readable" documents and would code for any type of document and webpage. And it would probably be a lot easier for web-developers (one file to deal with) and web-browser programmers (one standard format and not a mingling of them all).

I don't know, but it seems with all the complaints that there's too many competing standards, now would be a great time to come up with *one*.

Personally and professionally speaking, with the amount of documents I've amassed in WPD, Word and god-know-what other formats and not many good "translation" scripts to one standard document format, it would be ideal to get this one standard format. Otherwise, it does make it hard to choose which to use.

Micro$oft? Open?

[zuesse]

How can these two words be used in the same paragraph?

Is this how an open standard is developed?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the micro$oft way :)

One size fits nobody, you mean?

[Anonymous Coward]

Web pages don't define position. It can't, because the rendering is entirely up to the client viewing it. DTP is ALL about positioning. Wordprocessing is all about getting copy out which will be reformatted by a typesetter. Print media has a different need from electronic forms.

And then you have to consider whether a diagram program is part of "Office", whether database access, spreadsheets, and so on are part of it to, and then add the different requirements of THESE to the mix.

Making one up to do this won't work.

RTF?

[v4vijayakumar]

RTFD :)

Well, actually..

[famebait]

Is this how an open standard is developed?

I couldn't say for sure what is the norm for open standards development, but just about all _good_ standards are merely a codification of existing technology and implementations. Standards that are ratified before the real-world working experience exists are usually hell to work, or never get off the ground at all. Commonly they are hodegepodges of compromise between conflicting interests serving none of them well, are impossible to implement correctly, implementation efforts reveal gaping holes of under-specification, and the official 'reference implementations' tend to rather be useless, buggy, incomplete 'toy' technology demos than what their name would suggest.

Now, I agree that getting their standard ratified should not be just a rubber stamp process. There should be some vetting that might require MS to change certain things. But accusing the advantage of having the pre-standard implementation of being unfair is in itself unfair. There always will and should be someone who has that position, because the alternative is for the standard to suck.

You could argue that it should not be Microsoft who gets that position all the time, and that having someone there still doesn't guarantee that the standard won't suck, and I might agree. But argue those points, not for a 'clean-slate' standard.

The last thing we need is more paper tigers that are unusable but slow development of alternatives because "there is a standard".