ODF Editor Says ODF Loses If OOXML Does

An anonymous reader writes "The editor of the Open Document Format standard has written a letter (PDF) that strongly supports recognizing Microsoft's OOXML file format as a standard, arguing that if it fails, ODF will suffer. 'As the editor of OpenDocument, I want to promote OpenDocument, extol its features, urge the widest use of it as possible, none of which is accomplished by the anti-OpenXML position in ISO,' Patrick Durusau wrote. 'The bottom line is that OpenDocument, among others, will lose if OpenXML loses... Passage of OpenXML in ISO is going to benefit OpenDocument as much as anyone else.'"

Comments

Re:Okay, now I'm'a *hafta* RTFA...

[Liath]

can someone translate?

Re:ODF editor on OOXML

[Hal_Porter]

Oh, and yeah, great, they documented the format. But it is NOT something that should be accepted as a standard. BF is a documented programming language, but if you had to pick a standard language, would you pick BF, if there was, oh, any other alternative? No one is forcing you to use it but the fact that you don't like doesn't mean it shouldn't be a standard.

What is so difficult about the two words "open" and "standard"? A proprietary trade secret is antithetical to that. Relying on proprietary trade secrets in a proposed "open standard" makes it neither. They have documented it, so it is no longer a trade secret. Which is what people have asked them to do for ages with their office formats. New versions of Office support the new, documented standard. That standard allows round tripping back to Word 95, which they pretty much have to do. Round tripping drags in the legacy stuff.

Oh, by the way, we have a way to store odd formatting, and maintain backwards translateability -- styles. Extend the style system to where it can support weird shit like adjusting the "justify" algorithm, and store a SpacingLikeWordPerfectForDos (or whatever) style, in the document, with some special flag to indicate how it translates back into legacy formats (like Word 95 binary .doc). That seems to be what OOXML is doing. It looks like it's an XML encoding for the Office binary formats to me, just like (as someone put it) 'SMB is a serialization of NT IO manager semantics on the wire'. The upside to them publishing a standard is that you get some idea of how this stuff works. If you were writing converters to and from some other format, that's kind of useful, even if it's hard to see what justifyLikeWordPerfect1980 or whatever does. But so what? Just keep the attribute associated with the paragraph and write it into the OOXML file when you save. Or peek at MS Office and see how it reacts to it.

The alternative is that you sabotage the standard and they have absolutely no incentive of documenting anything, which seems far worse.

And it's a free world. If you don't want to use it, install OpenOffice and use ODF. Hell there are loads of standards I can't stand and will never use. But if I ever want to interoperate with them it's good that information, no matter how incomplete is published. I'd much rather have a few probably unused corner cases I can't support, like justifyLikeWordPerfect1980 rather than a completely undocumented format which is the current case with MS Office.

Seriously nagging them for ages about publishing a spec and then complaining that it's full of MS Officeisms just seems pointless politicking to me, especially as 90% of users won't even understand why that's bad. And actually no matter what happens with the standard, I suspect that most people will stick with whatever version of Office is site licensed to their company, regardless of whether the standard is ISO approved or not.

Re:We failed already

[DisKurzion]

Acrobat, on the other hand, is a bloated pile of garbage. When was the last time you used Acrobat? If you disable the "load on start" stuff, Acrobat 8 is pretty damn snappy, despite all the "bloated" features.

A typical text PDF that is 400 pages long (Oracle documentation, 8 MB) loads in about a second.
A 1000 page scanned book (85 MB downloaded from Google books) loads in less than 5 seconds.

All the poo-pooing elitist crap about "Acrobat being bloated" is little more than trolling for mod points (since it's obviously just group-think anymore).

No, this is simpler than that.

[malevolentjelly]

It doesn't matter what the editor of ODF thinks. Slashdot has already made up its mind. OpenXML has already been added to their simple binary belief system under "bad".

Thread summary:

Microsoft bad =>Microsoft OpenXML bad.
Open source good => Sun ODF good.

It doesn't matter if he points out that OpenXML as a standard will allow them to more easily standardize conversion between formats (since OpenXML not being an ISO standard will only dent its usage in the most official cases, likely prompting people to use the ODF plug-in for Office). Standardized formats in the mainstream benefit everyone. They underline the need for standards.