Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Okay, I Am Not An Iso-standard Expert (IANAIE ?), but that must be the most counter-intuitive argumentation I've heard this month.
He invoques the need to have a formal definition of some features (formula definitions and legacy stuff) as benifiting ODF if OOXML pass, so this raises the questions:
1) Aren't these already included to some extend in what was submitted for iso acceptation?
2) Wasn't this specification part of what EU's justice were asking Microsoft anyways?
3) Is it that hard to reverse-ingeneer that kind of spec?
Asking in good faith, as I really hav no clue.
Don't take my posts literally; it's just code to control my botnet.
He seems to hinge everything on the assumption that Microsoft is going to follow whatever version on OOXML is adopted, allowing ODF to be able to port those features. I think that's a huge assumption on his part.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
... at least so I can find out what he's smokin' and get me some of that. I mean, whah??? If OOOXML is garbage, and not an open standard given the really big implementation holes, and not apparently implemented *anywhere* (nor, some might argue, implement*able*), why is it in anyone's interest to have it passed? Aside from Microsoft's, of course.
Confused,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
I do not support any "standard" that is bad enough that its own promoters have to buy votes to get it in.
But if OOXML passes, customers, small to medium businesses and even world's governments are going to suffer. It's impossible for a team of 10 developers to implement a 1000+ page specification in their product. And because of ambiguities in the same, citizens will not be able to understand laws or government budgets of their own land.
The only thing is, 500 pages of ODF spec may not be much better for small businesses. What we need is a specification with multiple levels of fallback for simplier generators and consumers. For example, one part of a document zip file can be plain text contained in the document, with reasonable efforts to convert document structure to a human and machine readable plain text representation. For producers, it will be valid to generate a document bundle with only the text file and nothing else.
Yeah, that's what we call "not documenting the format."
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?
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.
Which in no way mandates that these legacy attributes also be completely opaque to every implementation except one.
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).
Except that, as you say, the cryptic legacy stuff is a trade secret. Which is why we really don't want it ratified as any kind of open standard, as it is, quite simply, not open.
I'm sorry, but you can't have it both ways. Either you've got trade secrets based on your file format, or you have an open standard. Not both.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
It's an office format, not nuclear fusion reactor design. ODF is already the better format, and there's nothing that ODF can learn from OOXML. Whatever expertise might flow from other standards into ODF already does because ODF (unlike OOXML) builds on existing standards.
But there's another reason why ODF won't benefit: OOXML "standardization" is just a trophy to Microsoft, a check-list item for buyers who want a standardized, open document format. Microsoft is going to keep adding proprietary extensions as they see fit, without bothering going through standardization or documenting them.
(The guy also grossly misuses the term "co-evolution", but let's not dwell on that.)
It might even be true that OOXML as an ISO standard would be beneficial to ODF. However, there are the following problems:
* There are some serious technical issues with the current proposal that have to be resolved
* There are some very serious problems with the way the process has evolved
* There is no guarantee that Microsoft will follow their own standards -- since, if there are big changes to the standard, it would require them to change their current file format.
The first two problems indicate that, perhaps, the fast-track-to-ISO was not a good idea for this standard, and that some more time and work is required before the standard is approved, no matter how beneficial an eventual approval would be for anyone.
Not necessarily. If anything, PDF is a great choice for distributing final copies of documents - it has exactly the right number of features, ts specs are published, and there are plenty of good tools (both open-source and commercial) for creating and reading it.
Acrobat, on the other hand, is a bloated pile of garbage.
...er, no, it means the author understands document file formats. The letter isn't meant for you or I to edit, and has a fixed layout, so PDF (being an open standard itself) is sensible.