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Microsoft Releases First Open XML SDK
Kurtz'sKompund tips us to news that Microsoft has released a finished version of the Open XML software development kit. Microsoft has made additional resources available with the download. Quoting Techworld:
"The SDK includes an application programming interface (API) simplifying the creation of code for searching documents, creating documents, validating document parts, modifying data and other tasks, Microsoft said. The API can be used in any language supported by the Microsoft .Net Framework, the company said. The current SDK supports the version of Open XML supported by Office 2007, which is not the same as that ratified as a standard by the ISO, due to changes effected during the ratification process."
"It's a trap!"
Circumcision is child abuse.
This is Microsoft Office 2007 Open XML, not Open XML. An API for producing documents containing deprecated features is of no use to anyone bar Microsoft, who can claim tha they are making available tools that support a yet-to-be-defined standard.
For all we know, the next version of Office will support the officially defined and documented standard, which will have hundreds of changes compared to the current O2K7 format of Open XML. Thus, everyone will have to recode all new stuff just to stay in sync. A wasted effort, in my opinion.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
The current SDK supports the version of Open XML supported by Office 2007, which is not the same as that ratified as a standard by the ISO, due to changes effected during the ratification process.
Because anyone who follows Microsoft knows the game is to never have the two match.
Continue the charade all you want microsoft, but we don't buy it, and your mockery of the open standards process is now under heavy attack in the form of appeals.
Nobody but the people you pay to think otherwise is fooled.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
The "API" is useless without a fully documented format. The API will die over time just as certainly as the applications that use it. The only real answer to long term data storage is full documentation that can be used to create applications, on any platform, free of encumbrances, that can read and format the documents that you create on your systems that you've paid for.
An API for suck does not undo the suck.
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What a steaming pile of bullshit! First off, it hasn't really been ratified yet, ahem. Second, the draft that Microsoft submitted did not match the version used in Office 2007, before any changes were made.
> The current SDK supports the version of Open XML supported by Office 2007, which is not
> the same as that ratified as a standard by the ISO
No version of Microsoft's "Open XML" has been ratified as a standard by the ISO.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
"You can use the Open XML API in any language supported by the Microsoft .NET Framework®. The help topics presented in this SDK provide code samples in Microsoft Visual C#® and Microsoft Visual Basic® .NET."
Instead, just call it OOXML.
When did this stop being called "Office Open XML" and start being called "Open XML"? Or is this yet another new animal?
I hate to break it to you, but Microsoft only has a product to sell there in the first place by the grace of those countries' copyright laws. Since they are the sovereign entities, not Microsoft, if Microsoft tried to pull that kind of stunt they'd be well within their rights to simply declare Microsoft's software to be Public Domain and use it all they want!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
MSFT's next initiative: Source Open Software (SOS), to source all software technology from open source. By ISO submission time the word 'Source' will be dropped and it will simply be known as the Open Software Standard, at which time all lawsuit against MS shall be dismissed due to the fact that the 'OS' in Windows product line will no longer stand for 'operating system'... Hey Microsoft, pay me for the idea! I patented it...
Can you be more specific about why? It's the OOXML specification which the ISO is concerned with. An available SDK has little to do with whether OOXML is a suitable document specification one way or the other, as far as I can tell.
Microsoft provides SDKs for lots of its technologies because it wants to make it simpler for its development community to use them. Most of these SDKs primarily target DotNet because that's the primary development platform that Microsoft wants people to write Windows apps in. The fact that this SDK exists in theory doesn't preclude someone else from writing an equivalent SDK for another platform, certainly if the actual OOXML specification is as adequate as the ISO has already declared it to be (pending the appeals process). Personally I don't think the OOXML specification is adequate for such purposes, but I can't see how a Microsoft-provided SDK has anything to do with that, or why it should be of any interest to the ISO. It's entirely another issue.
An API like this is potentially even a good thing. Granted that it gives Microsoft direct control over whether third party developers will write malformed formats that are incompatible with the standard, and they seem to actually be doing that. But it's also encouraging developers not to duplicate their own code for reading and writing document formats, and tying themselves into specific details of an XML spec. If apps are built around an API like this one, which they certainly will be now that it's available, it would (theoretically) make it much easier to port them to work with alternative document formats in the future. Who knows? Microsoft might one day even update the code behind its API to generically support more formats than just OOXML -- especially if they're acutally serious about supporting OASIS in the future.
Yeah it could be Microsoft trying to subvert the process again, but it could also simply be that Microsoft's a gigantic corporation, and that some parts of it don't necessarily work in sync with other parts of it. This is perhaps even to the extent that they might try to provide useful things from time to time without the malicious intent that could have been preferred from the ruling upper levels in the hierarchy.
Others have said no, it needs (x) so let me add one.
No, it needs to be ignored. Let's talk to the customers on this one.
A businessman's hope for his business is that it persist and grow for several decades at least, until he can reap his reward and exit phenomenally wealthy. If you architect your business intelligence on the platform of a corporation whose business model is to obsolete its platforms every five years at the most, you're an idiot and you deserve to be have your resources drained by this decade's P.T. Barnum until in the ferocious environment of the day you and your grand ideas are forgotten.
In the public sector the objective is to conduct the public's business in such a way that resources are not wasted and required openness can be delivered. It's essential that the public's investment in creating information is well preserved. If you're in the public sector and architect public infrastructure on such a platform as Office 2007 OXML you're worse than incompetent - you're a traitor to the cause of public service.
OOXML is irrelevant. The problem of construction of a document is solved. The user interface is an interesting diverse field where members compete but all the options that don't lead to truly open documents are blind alleys. Office 2007 formats are some of these blind alleys that will yield only wasted efforts because the vendor needs to obsolete your documents every five years in order to maintain its current cash flow. If you succeed in hitching your cart to this train it will come off its rails in less than five years when the provider needs to sell you new applications. Why would you do that? Trust me, if you're in public service and you choose to do that eventually somebody is going to follow the money right to you. Have you got longer than that to retirement? If you're in business the problem will solve itself and not to your benefit.
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