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UOF Vies to Be a Third Contender in ODF–OOXML Battle
Andy Updegrove writes "Long-time followers of the ODF-OOXML story will recall that there is a third editable, XML-based document format in the race to create the documentary record of history. That contender is called UOF, for Uniform Office Format, and it has been under development in China since 2002. Last summer, UOF was adopted as a Chinese National Standard, and on Friday the first complete office suite based upon UOF was released. It's called Evermore Integrated Office 2009 (EIOffice 2009 for short). How successful could this new entrant be in China? For starters, Evermore Software Co. Ltd., its developer, is reportedly the largest software vendor to the Chinese government. And then there's price: Evermore's professional edition is less than a quarter of the price of the comparable version of Office 2007. And finally, it's clearly no coincidence that on July 11, Evermore Vice President Cao Shen called for Microsoft to be the first target for China's new anti-monopoly law, which will take effect in just ten days' time. Whether Shen is speaking to, or for, the government remains to be seen."
this kind of crap is the ambition of jerkoffs and lesbians.
gay
The enemy of my enemy is my friend. On the one hand, you have MS (anti-competitive, anti-freedom), and on the other, you have China (anti-freedom, police state). I guess which one is the 'friend' depends on one's POV.
Coming soon from MacDonald Software, the Enterprise Interoperability Evermore Integrated Office release (E-I-E-I-O).
I can't (yet) think of any reasons for them not to open up (properly) the format so that OO.org can read it.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Last I knew, they were working on a way to harmonize UOF with ODF. How is that going?
Seeing as how both ODF and UOF is based upon open standards (based on Wikipedia), what advantages does UOF offer over ODF?
EIEIOffice
They should have called it the Uniform Format of Office. UFO sounds way better than UOF.
That's how this Chinese company understand the rule. Buy the government then their shit becomes standard.
Seeing as how both ODF and UOF is based upon open standards (based on Wikipedia), what advantages does UOF offer over ODF?
Less jail time if your Tibet protest pamphlets are saved in UOF?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I hope they also try to ram UOF down ISO's throats. The ensuing chaos will require actual government to step in and impose a standard by fiat.
Or we could all just go back to using LaTeX. I'd be alright with that. Actually, I learned LaTeX after switching to odf, so I've always viewed LaTeX as an upgrade from odf.
but it is NaN times more expensive than OpenOffice.org!
So I take it the UOF standard will allow you to write anything as long as its not political, anti-social or anything about human rights? I wonder if it has its own version of Clippy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clippy? "I see you are writing an article on human rights. Would you like to see a list of government agencies that are watching you?"
Uniform Office Format explained on Wikipedia.
Here is software that will convert between ODF and UOF, written by the Open Standard Lab of Peking University. In the process of writing this software, they have been participating in the UOF standardization process and talking with ODF folks to make sure the two formats can be converted well.
The UOF is a written standard approved by the Chinese national standardization bodies - not just "whatever ElOffice does". I don't know if there is an english translation - I have been able to find one with google.
I could imagine the Chinese Government planting several backdoors in the specification and/or the apps, as to make easier for them to get any data they want. ;-)
Not that it's the first time this has been done!
They developed a full-fledged word processor?, what are the capabilities, platform, requirements or features. Or is just the format and a convertor from-to ODF or .doc?
1. Get a team of programmers and sponsor them with big chinese govt. money
2. Put them to work to get rid of Microsoft
3. Profit!!
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary, over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore, while I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. "Tis some visitor", I muttered, tapping at my chamber door... only this, and nothing more.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
I don't avoid MS Office or Windows because they're from Microsoft. I avoid them because they cost a lot and I don't really like them that much anyway. I also don't like the way that Microsoft doesn't give me the freedom to use them how I want to. Why should a format, OS and/or Office suite that originates from China be judged any differently?
I'm not a great fan of China or its policies, many of which I find quite abhorrent and I'll protest about them in my own way for what they are. China's a massive and very complext place, though. If UOF and EIOffice are actually beneficial and useful (neither of which I could vouch for because I haven't seen them), wouldn't it just make sense to encourage them on their individual merits?
Exceptions to this might be if you could show that the UOF specifications were developed by jailed political prisoners being unjustly forced to live in torture chambers and design document format specifications against their will, and perhaps you wouldn't want to encourage that kind of thing if it's likely to continue happening. But if you ignored ideas simply because of where they came from rather than the merits of the ideas themselves, you'd be restricting yourself a lot and we probably wouldn't have many of the beneficial things we have today.
I know this is being considered by standards committees, but I was wondering if there's a national security angle to this? Could you slip anything subversive into a standard? I mean, from the defense angle I can see dependence on a U.S. corporation as a huge deal, but other than that...?
I can see a future where English-speaking users struggle through Chinese software that's badly translated but free and effective nonetheless...
It's called "HTML" and everybody is already using it.
Members all over or mislead the are almost MOVIE [imdb.com] incompatibilities the gay niggers members' creative when IDC recently rules to follow the same operation to the original empire in decline, they are Come on of challenges that these rules will when done playing the mundane chores for election, I SLING you can people's Faces at 1. Therefore there Satan's Dick And theorists - clean for the next to have to decide the system clean triumphs would soon guys are usually new faces and many battled in court, Uncover a story of Romeo and Juliet FreeBSD because If you do not goals I personally SLING you can a relatively If you answered You need to succeed Bunch of gay negros Their parting For the record, I hot on the heels of your own beer
it would be good to know what
UOF does better than ODF ?
(is anything possible in UOF that ODF can NOT do...)
what actually makes it better apart from some contractor having a better understanding ?
regards
John jones
http://www.johnjones.me.uk
is quite common in China. However, as for UOF, this is not totally due to the Chinese standardization body. When the idea of the UOF standard was forming in 2002, ODF had not been on its standardization track yet. It turned out that the development of UOF was slower and ODF got ahead.
Another example of this kind of NIH is the standards for Chinese character encoding. There are a series of "GBxxxxx" standards (GB is for Guo-Biao, acronym for national standard in Chinese) which are totally incompatible with Unicode, but both GB and Unicode are widely used China, causing a great deal of pain and trouble. Some Web developers, unaware of the character encoding problem, screw up the Web pages by sending the wrong header or using the wrong XML declaration. Some email programs automatically fuck up your email's encoding. This also made distributed development more difficult.
Usually the "invented-here" standards are not technically better than the others. Some of them are too restricted in scope (e.g. the GB encodings can handle English, Chinese, Japanese kana and the Cyrillic alphabet, but few others). But now it may be too late to make a change.
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
You don't get to be in a position where you're the CEO/President of a company who's standard is "blessed" by the Chinese government without having very deep tendrils into the government itself (cough...corruption/nepotism...cough).
More often than not, there are personal and/or family relations between the regulators and the regulated in China that would land all the parties in jail in a developed country. Welcome to Chinese business 101.
I'm only hoping that openoffice will open all of that junk...nothing like getting a docx that NOBODY can open...
It does complicate matters for microsoft, perhaps much more than it does for the odf. But I'll be supporting* the odf no less!
*I only really care marginally because there is a free format in competition. It's like fighting over what pen ink to make popular, for crying out loud.
What's the value of information that you don't know?
I don't remember where from, but I remember hearing something about merging UOF with ODF.
But, of course, only relatives of the Chinese politburo would be permitted to benefit, and Open Source would be illegal.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
And finally, it's clearly no coincidence that on July 11, Evermore Vice President Cao Shen called for Microsoft to be the first target for China's new anti-monopoly law, which will take effect in just ten days' time.
Evil seem to be experiencing some kernel-panic.
If you quote this signature there'll be 72 copies of Windows ME waiting for you in Heaven.
Here in MN and ND we would like to use Uniform Format Diverse Applications (UFDA)
However, $\lim_{x\to\0}\frac{1}{x}=\infty$
Whatever solution openoffice offers should consider some integration with the Global Computer users' most popular computer activities(i.e. in China QQ, movie watching, game playing, office productivity). Simply offering a document standard and tool to create those standard documents isn't enough.
There needs to be much more effort in presenting open-source solutions on the ground, in the schools, in the government. As it stands, from my standpoint as a Conversational English teacher, in the Chinese schools I see nothing but Windows and Office.
As an open-source fan, it is only natural for me to bring in a live cd of Ubuntu to show them open-office, eva, gcompris and other open-source educational software. The teachers were truly impressed with the Google English to Chinese/Chinese to English translation tools. It's a big hit for this since the browser response seems to run faster than in windows in their perspective and not mine which is good news for Ubuntu/Google/Firefox. The kids love gcompris and pydance. I even got the USB floor dance pad for them and they love to jump all over it.
On the downside, most of the computers around here only have 256MB on them and UBUNTU won't install on them, but some teacher PC's have 512MB RAM thank God.
We need more English teachers that are Linux fans in China. It would help to influence China's computer infrastructure by demonstrating what's available to them that truly competes with any other offerings out there.
Cheers :)
What Microsoft could do is, start offering doses of opium free to the Chinese with purchases of Windows. Then, if the Chinese government tried to stop it, Microsoft could claim foul to our government, who would land troops and suppress the Chinese government enough to ensure that the opium was distributed so that people would turn to Microsoft for more opium.
This is my sig.
Why didn't you just learn traditional shorthand instead of all of that rube goldberg mess you did? About as fast as it gets, a "standard" for decades for note taking before "word processing" was even invented.
Fuck off liberal troll. You really think people in Chinese prisons/reeducation camps have it as easy as they do in Gauntanimo?
You are simply retarded, and demean the plight of chinese dissidents to try and puff up your own ego. The world would be well rid of you, and with any luck you have not spawned.
How many versions of wordprocessor extensions do we really need?
One or two. And one or two for spreadsheets, and presentations, and so on.
The point is that it should be the right one or two. It would kind of suck if that extension ended up being TXT, right?
Operating Systems using extended attributes for file types (like OS/2 and Mac OS X) have no problems when all extension are the same. In fact they work perfectly well with no extensions at all.
It's not just a "new extension", it's actually a different file format -- there's a lot more work that has to go into this than typing "odt" instead of "doc".
This is why I think IBM and Apple got it right in not relying on extensions for file formats and it would be better of if we did not have them at all. And I don't speak about hiding them - which only leads to "Summer Vacation Photo.jpg.exe" exploits.
Interesting side note on hiding extension: With Mac OS X hiding extensions is an (extended) attribute of the file so you can decide for each file separately if you want to see the extension or not.
Also note that NTFS and most Linux file systems support extended attributes as well - Windows and Linux just don't use all the features there file system offers.
And before you ask: Both OS/2 and Mac OS X support extended attributes on FAT as well (both using hidden files to keep them).
But wait: Windows and Linux don't have fall back mechanism for file systems which don't support extended attributes natively. That might be the reason they don't use them.
Martin
~/.mozilla/firefox/<profile>/chrome/userContent.css
/* Override the default boxing bar */
.contain {
/* Override the boxing bar when replying */
.inline_comment {
@-moz-document domain(slashdot.org) {
border-color: -moz-use-text-color #FFFFFF rgb(255, 255, 255) !important;
}
border: 0px;
margin: 1.5em;
}
}
Rules without !important are overruled by author rules if the author sets any. Rules with !important overrule author rules.
The only thing that makes userContent.css an excruciatingly painful experience is the fact that you actually have to _restart_ Firefox after making any changes. How 1994 is that?
Perfect is the enemy of done.
The Evil of Microsoft, or the Evil of China?
I think I'll at least give credit to Microsoft for executing fewer people. At least, that I know about.
According to what I've googled, this is based on what was originally called "RedOffice", the Chinese fork of OpenOffice.
If UOF is based on a product derived from "RedOffice", that means the format is likely to have similar limitations to ODF and OOXML, both of which are based directly or indirectly on Word's document structure.
The problem is that Word's document structure is awful. It's not a hierarchical format in any meaningful sense, the only nestable structure is the table, and the basic block is a fully qualified paragraph or a fully qualified style. Every Word-compatible word processor I've used has had this same problem, and it makes any kind of automated processing of the resulting document a pain in the neck... or forced blind reliance on complex and opaque libraries.
Even raw HTML is a better format for documents than anything based on Word's document structure. Heck, even for archival purposes where layout is critical, Postscript or simple PDF is a better choice than a Word-derived format: it retains details of the layout and you don't need an editable format for archiving, and it's well defined with multiple existing implementations.
What the world needs is a good word processor that uses something like Docbook as its native format.
The only thing that makes userContent.css an excruciatingly painful experience is the fact that you actually have to _restart_ Firefox after making any changes. How 1994 is that?
So use stylish, unless you are running nightly builds or something.
Does anyone else find it ironic that a (supposedly) Communist country has passed an anti-monopoly law?
PDF was mentioned in this interesting, now 5 years old, advisory Valoris report (as PDF, of course ;-)).
I can really recommend this as it shows how much strife and conflict we've all had the past 5 years, and how much is at stake :-/
Apparently, the next version of the European Interoperability Framework is in the making, and these months you can post public comments. So if you think UOF should be adopted by European governments, now's your chance :-)
The draft document is at this location, and probably chapter 8 is most relevant for us Slashdotters. Note MS = Member States and PEGSCO = IDABC management committee (nothing to do with SCO).
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
Well... what about if this format is just basically a copy of ODF or MS OOXML with tag names and structure artificially and trivially altered. One can then reject this as the standard on the same ground as rejecting a trivial patent -- non-original no additional benefits.
I have not even heard of such office suite even though I read Chinese news everyday and in the software business. I heard of the "Gold Mountain" office suite. Everybody -- government or citizens -- use nothing but MS Office. But I'm willing to bet $100 that the above is exactly what's happening given the nature of tech standard coming from China: some guys connecting to some officials imitates an existing standard, make some useless alternation, push it as the "national standard" and wish to be able sell the software because of that. Of course, the good thing is that nobody -- not even the various government agencies -- would pay a shot for that.