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Gary Edwards

Is ODF the new RTF or the new .DOC? Can it be both? Do we need either? - O'Reilly Broadcast... - 0 views

  • Unless governments and other stakeholders can get beyond the
    narrow view of documents and interoperability as merely being exchanging data
    from one similar application to another, and move towards the view that
    documents and web resources need to be end points on the same interoperable
    spectrum, we are selling ourselves short.



    It is here that standards bodies should be more help: but I
    don't know that they can be unless there is a stronger commitment to supporting
    each others' visions better. W3C's mission statement is concerned with bringing
    the web to its full potential, and W3C have traditionally used this to justify shying
    away from old-fashioned compound file-based issues: the lack of standards for
    the *SP (JSP, ASP, PHP) class of documents is a symptom of this, and it is
    notable that much of XML's uptake came because it did take care of practical
    production issues (i.e. issues pertaining to the document as it existed before
    being made available as a resource —PIs
    and entities—and after
    it had been retrieved—character
    encodings.) The industry consortia such as ECMA and OASIS are organized
    around interest groups on particular standards, which makes it easy to fob off
    discussion of interoperability. And even ISO, where the availability are
    topic-based working groups with very broad interests should provide a more
    workable home for this kind of effort, have a strong disinclination to seek out
    work that involves liaison with other standards groups: satisfying two sets of
    procedures and fitting in with two sets of deadlines and timetables can be
    impractical and disenfranchising for volunteers and small-business/academic experts.

  • Gary Edwards
     
    Jon Bosak, who founded the XML and ODF efforts among many other achievements, recently wrote an article concerning the position of ODF, Open XML and PDF Jon's public writings are rare, well-considered and always of interest. As with other Sun-affiliated people in recent times, Jon has been exemplary in that even though he has a side, he does not take sides. I think I can agree with much of what he says, though I would note Don't forget about HTML.
Paul Merrell

Lotus Symphony now reads Office 2007 documents - 0 views



  • IBM today announced the release of Lotus Symphony 1.3, an update to its year-old free productivity suite that for the first time lets users import files saved in Microsoft Office 2007's native Office Open XML (OOXML) document format.
Paul Merrell

untitled - 0 views

  • Most (quality) specifications provide clear instructions using
    those magic words SHALL, SHALL NOT, and MAY where those words have
    a defined meaning for an implementor. Paragraphs are clearly
    identified as either normative or informative. That way an
    implementor knows what they must and may implement to claim
    conformance against a specification. This approach has been well
    established over time as a sensible way for spec writers and
    implementors to work
  • Most (quality) specifications provide clear instructions using
    those magic words SHALL, SHALL NOT, and MAY where those words have
    a defined meaning for an implementor. Paragraphs are clearly
    identified as either normative or informative. That way an
    implementor knows what they must and may implement to claim
    conformance against a specification. This approach has been well
    established over time as a sensible way for spec writers and
    implementors to work




    That is the way quality specifications are written. For
    example, ISO/IEC's JTC 1
    Directives
    (link to PDF) requires that international standards
    designed for interoperability "specify clearly and unambiguously
    the conformity requirements that are essential to achieve the
    interoperability."





    With that clarity, conformance is testable and can provide
    confidence of interoperability. A suite of tests may be developed
    and applied to an implementation to determine which tests pass,
    which fail, and hence arrive at an objective pronouncement on
    conformance of an implementation against the entirety of the
    specification.

  • In a quality specification, it should be feasible to select a
    normative paragraph, identify a conformance test for it, and make
    a clear statement that this test proves that an implementation
    meets (or fails to meet) that requirement. Call it a test plan:
    define the tests (test specification), define the expected set of
    results, and define what constitutes a "pass" of each test that
    establishes conformance. The plan then provides the matrix of test
    spec against requirement. Simple.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Rob Weir of IBM chaired (apology for the misuse of that last
    word) the formation list and then simply announced what the
    charter would be rather than seeking consensus among the list
    participants. As part of this process before that charter was
    produced and while I still naively believed that consensus was a
    goal, I sat down with ODF 1.1 and did a paragraph-by-paragraph
    review for testability. The numbers were quite revealing. I
    completely reviewed only the first four major sections and found
    very few clear requirements.




    The majority were mere statements with no normative language
    used to identify what was required or optional. Implementors would
    have to make their own interpretation.

  • It's ironic that the chair viewed as good news the fact that
    there were far fewer testable paragraphs than he had predicted. But
    his prediction of 10,000 test cases is probably far closer to how
    many testable paragraphs there should be; my counts were actually
    bad news.
  • All of the above leads to the interesting question of just how
    the chair expects to accomplish much that is useful in regard to ODF
    conformance testing before the specification is amended to tighten
    up the language and add clear requirements. The syntax conformity is
    already handled by validation against the schema, but the semantics
    are woefully under-specified.
  • Summary: ODF 1.1 isn't verifiable as a specification. From a
    fairly cursory review of the latest draft, ODF 1.2 will follow the
    same path. With OASIS now being more demanding regarding conformance
    requirements on every specification and with ISO/IEC taking a closer
    interest in liaison with the ODF TC, I find it hard to see how the
    ODF TC co-chairs can maintain this view toward verification.
Jesper Lund Stocholm

Alex Brown on the ODF Zero Interop problem: The discussion to limit the use of Foreign elem... - 0 views

  • So I think users need to understand, very clearly, that an ODF
    document/app of *either* conformance class has an EXTREMELY WEAK CLAIM
    TO INTEROPERABILITY. The "pure ODF conformance" sticker would be at best
    valueless and at worst positively misleading.

    So what I'd like to see is some real effort from the TC going into
    resolving this problem ...
    • Jesper Lund Stocholm
       
      The sad thing is that with the agreement between JTC1 and OASIS regarding ODF, it seems that SC34 has been completely cut out of the loop in terms of "fixing ODF", as you put it.

      I cannot see how SC34 will be able to play any part in this - besides rubber-stamping ODF 1.2 when it comes our way.
  • Gary Edwards
     
    So I think users need to understand, very clearly, that an ODF
    document/app of *either* conformance class has an EXTREMELY WEAK CLAIM
    TO INTEROPERABILITY. The "pure ODF conformance" sticker would be at best
    valueless and at worst positively misleading.

    So what I'd like to see is some real effort from the TC going into
    resolving this problem ... Alex Brown

    What Alex fails to mention is that the "foreign elements and alien attributes" components in the ODF Section 1.5 "Compliance and Conformance" clause was originally put there in early 2003 to provide a compatibility layer for MSOffice binary documents. Without this clause, it would be impossible to convert the billions of legacy MSOffice binary documents to ODF without breaking the fidelity. Now th OASIS ODF TC wants to limit the use of the compatiblity clause. An action that would seriously cripple Microsoft's efforts to implement ODF in MSOffice 14.

    No surprises here. It was only a matter of time until IBM and Sun ganged up on the newest TC member, Microsoft.
  • Jesper Lund Stocholm
     
    So I think users need to understand, very clearly, that an ODF
    document/app of *either* conformance class has an EXTREMELY WEAK CLAIM
    TO INTEROPERABILITY. The "pure ODF conformance" sticker would be at best
    valueless and at worst positively misleading.

    So what I'd like to see is some real effort from the TC going into
    resolving this problem ... Alex Brown

    What Alex fails to mention is that the "foreign elements and alien attributes" components in the ODF Section 1.5 "Compliance and Conformance" clause was originally put there in early 2003 to provide a compatibility layer for MSOffice binary documents. Without this clause, it would be impossible to convert the billions of legacy MSOffice binary documents to ODF without breaking the fidelity. Now th OASIS ODF TC wants to limit the use of the compatiblity clause. An action that would seriously cripple Microsoft's efforts to implement ODF in MSOffice 14.

    No surprises here. It was only a matter of time until IBM and Sun ganged up on the newest TC member, Microsoft.
Gary Edwards

Europe: Microsoft's behavior has changed, interop docs already complete | Tech Policy & Law... - 0 views

  • Gary Edwards
     
    "In light of changes in Microsoft's behaviour, the increased opportunity for third parties to exercise their rights directly before national courts and experience gained since the adoption of the 2004 Decision," this morning's statement reads, "the Commission no longer requires a full time monitoring trustee to assess Microsoft's compliance. In future, the Commission intends to rely on the ad hoc assistance of technical consultants.


    "Microsoft has an ongoing obligation to supply complete and accurate interoperability information as specified in the Commission's 2004 Microsoft Decision," the EC goes on. "However, given that the original set of interoperability information has already been documented by Microsoft, increased opportunities through private enforcement provisions in Microsoft's license agreements for third parties to exercise their rights directly before national courts, and experience gained since the adoption of the 2004 Decision, the nature of the technical assistance that the Commission requires is now of a more ad hoc character."
Paul Merrell

Where is there an end of it? | Real Conformance for ODF? - 0 views

  • There has been quite a lot of hubbub recently about ODF conformance, in particular about how conformance to the forthcoming ODF 1.2 specification should be defined.
  • The proposal caused much debate. In support of the new conformance clause, IBM's Rob Weir described foreign elements (formerly so welcome in ODF) as proprietary extensions that are “evil” and as a “nuclear death ray gun”. Questioning the proposal, KOffice's Thomas Zander wrote that he was “worried that we are trying to remove a core feature that I depend on in both KOffice and Qt”. Meanwhile Microsoft's Doug Mahugh made a counter-proposal suggesting that ODF might adopt the Markup Compatibility and Extensibility mechanisms from ISO/IEC 29500 (OOXML).



    Things came to a head in a 9-2-2 split vote last week which saw the new conformance text adopted in the new ODF committee specification by will of the majority. Following this there was some traffic in the blogosphere with IBM's Rob Weir commenting and Microsoft's Doug Mahugh counter-commenting on the vote and the circumstances surrounding it.

Gary Edwards

An Interop Nightmare: The Northwest Progressive Institute Advocate Review of OpenOffice.org... - 0 views

  • Gary Edwards
     
    Marbux at his best! Let's hope the OASIS ODF and OpenOffice.org groups get to work on real interop, and stop with the phony baloney. It can be done, bu tnothing is going to happen until people face up to the harsh reality that today there is zero interop between ODF compliant applications. This must change .... unless of course the world decides to move to the most interoperable but high performance format ever invented: HTML-CSS.

    And maybe from there the world can move onto the WebKit sugarplum document model, and truly set the future of the Open Web. One thing obviously missing for the Open Web is an office suite of high performance editors capable of natively producing high end WebKit documents (or basic HTML-CSS for that matter!!!!!!!)

    Good on marbux. Now, can you persuade OASIS and OpenOffice to change their application specific ways? Take on the desktop as well as the future of the Open Web?
Gary Edwards

Report: Companies Use Word Out of Habit, Not Necessity > Comments by ge - 0 views

  • Gary Edwards
     
    I doubt that MSOffice ODF will make a difference. ODF was not designed to be compatible with MSOffice, and conversion from native binary to ODF will result in a serious loss of fidelity and business process markup. If the many ODF pilots are an indication, the real killer is that application specific processing logic will be lost on conversion even if it is Microsoft doing the conversion to ODF. This logic is expressed as scripts, macros, OLE, data binding, media binding, add-on specifics, and security settings.

    These components are vital to existing business processes. Besides, Microsoft will support ISO 26300, which is not compatible with the many aspects of ODF 1.2 currently implemented by most ODF applications.

    The most difficult barrier to entry is that of MSOffice bound business processes so vital to workgroups and day-to-day business systems. Maybe the report is right in saying that day-to-day business routines become habit, but not understanding the true nature of these barriers is certain to cloud our way forward. We need to dig deeper, as demonstrated by the many ODF pilot studies.
Jesper Lund Stocholm

Publicly Available Standards - 0 views

  • The following standards are made freely available for standardization purposes. They are protected by copyright and therefore and unless otherwise specified, no part of these publications may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, microfilm, scanning, reproduction in whole or in part to another Internet site, without permission in writing from ISO. Requests should be addressed to the ISO Central Secretariat.
  • ISO/IEC 29500-1:2008

    Electronic inserts



    1st

    Information technology -- Document description and processing languages -- Office Open XML File Formats -- Part 1: Fundamentals and Markup Language Reference

    JTC1/SC34



    ISO/IEC 29500-2:2008

    Electronic inserts


    1st

    Information technology -- Document description and processing languages -- Office Open XML File Formats -- Part 2: Open Packaging Conventions

    JTC1/SC34



    ISO/IEC 29500-3:2008


    1st

    Information technology -- Document description and processing languages -- Office Open XML File Formats -- Part 3: Markup Compatibility and Extensibility

    JTC1/SC34



    ISO/IEC 29500-4:2008

    Electronic inserts


    1st

    Information technology -- Document description and processing languages -- Office Open XML File Formats -- Part 4: Transitional Migration Features

    JTC1/SC34
    • Jesper Lund Stocholm
       
      Remenber also to download the electronic inserts containing e.g. reference schemas in electronic form.
  • ISO/IEC 26300:2006

    XHTML version

    1st
    Information technology -- Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) v1.0

    XHTML version
  • Paul Merrell
     
    Most ISO and IEC standards are only available for purchase. However, a few are publicly available at no charge. ISO/IEC:26300-2006 is one of the latter and can be downloaded from this page in XHTML format. Note that the standards listed on the page are arranged numerically and the OpenDocument standard is very near the bottom of the page. This version of ODF is the only version that has the legal status of an international standard, making it eligible as a government procurement specification throughout all Member nations of the Agreement on Government Procurement.
Gary Edwards

Can a file be ODF and Open XML at the same time? (and HTML? and a Java servlet? and a PDF a... - 0 views

  • The recent bomb in the ODF world from Gary Edward’s claims that Sun successfully blocked the addition of features to ODF that would be needed for full interchange with Office are explosive not only because they demonstrate how ODF was (properly, in my view) developed to cope with the particular features of the participants, not really as a universal format, but also because the prop up Microsoft’s position that Open XML is required because it exposes particular features that ISO ODF is not capable of exposing. Both because ODF is still in progress and because sometimes the features are simply incompatible in the details.
  • Actually, ODF is about to get a new manifest along with the new metadata stuff. Because we base that on RDF, the manifest will also be RDF-based. It gives us the extensibility we want to provide (extension developers, for example, can add extra metadata they may need), without having to worry about breaking compatibility. The primary addition we've made is a mechanism to bind a stable URI to in-document content node ids and files. This is conceptually not all that different than what I see in OPC; it's just that the unique IDs are in fact URIs. Among other things, in the RDF context that allows further statements to be bound to those URIs.




  • Gary Edwards
     
    What Bruce doesn't explain in this highlighted clip is that Sun decided to limit the "extra metadata" developer might need to just a handful of elements Sun and IBM needed to use in OpenOffice. The original OpenDocument Foundation metadata proposal was to open up the use of metadata to the extent that metadata could be used for all aspects of presentation (formatting AND layout!).
  • Gary Edwards
     
    This vendor specific - application specific limiting ended the last hope we had for ODF interoperability and backwards compatibility with the billions of "in-process" MSOffice documents known to be populating business processes the world over. In fact, the problem ODF adoption faces is primarily that of MSOffice bound business processes, reflected in these billions of workgroup-workflow documents.
  • Gary Edwards
     
    Proposal to have a standard packaging for combining application specific XML formats, Open HTML, and PDF. Great comments. This July 2007 article links to a January 2009 article: http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2009/01/packaging-formats-of-famous-ap.html
Paul Merrell

Doug Mahugh : ODF Implementation Notes for Office 2007 SP2 - 0 views

  • Microsoft has today published our first set of document-format implementation notes, for the ODF implementation in Office 2007 SP2. These notes, which are available on the DII web site, provide detailed information about the design decisions that went into our implementation of ODF 1.1.
  • Doug,


    The list of elements and attributes "not supported in core Word/Excel/PowerPoint 2007" is quite long. Can you tell us what will happen, when Office 2007 encouters an unsupported element.


    Will it simply be ignored?


    When roundtripping - will it be deleted or preserved?

  • Doug,


    The list of elements and attributes "not supported in core Word/Excel/PowerPoint 2007" is quite long. Can you tell us what will happen, when Office 2007 encouters an unsupported element.


    Will it simply be ignored?


    When roundtripping - will it be deleted or preserved?

  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Jesper,


    On load, Office 2007 SP2 will simply ignore the unsupported elements and attributes in ODF files.  We do not attempt to round trip unsupported elements and attributes, they will be removed from the ODF file if you resave it using Office 2007 SP2.  This is consistent with our implementation principles and our desire to provide predictable behavior.   We considered trying to roundtrip elements and attributes that we do not understand or support, but we found if we did this that we could not be sure the resulting files were internally consistent and conformant ODF files.  


    As an aside, there are some cases where we write elements or attributes on save that we do not support on load, for the sake of better interoperability with other applications that use ODF.   Those cases are described in the implementer notes as well.

  • Paul Merrell
     
    Jesper Lund Stocholm asks a right-on-the-mark question. Peter Amstein answers for Microsoft. What do you expect when a specification ends its conformance section with the statement, "There are no rules regarding the elements and attributes that actually have to be supported by conforming applications, except that applications should not use foreign elements and attributes for features defined in the OpenDocument schema?"
Gary Edwards

MIcrosot's latest kiss of death: ODF - 0 views

  • Gary Edwards
     
    Embrace. Extend. Extinguish.

    That's how Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) killed Netscape many moons ago. Embrace this newfangled "Web browser" market with a new product. Extend the existing Web standards with proprietary technologies like ActiveX. Extinguish the competition by denying them access to those fancy new features. When it works, this is a great way to build and maintain wide, alligator-filled business moats.

    It seems to me that Mr. Softy is up to his old tricks again. The target this time is the OpenDocument standard, a free and open alternative to Microsoft's own Office formats for text documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and more.
Gary Edwards

Document Interoperability Initiative: Appendix H - 0 views

  • Gary Edwards
     
    Microsoft recently released their blueprint for implementing ISO 26300 (ODF 1.0 - dated May 1, 2005), and referenced this Web site. Appendix H is interesting in that it lists 13 of the 28 contributors sponsored by The OpenDocument Foundation. This contributor list contradicts the determined liars (er, editors) at Wikipedia who insist that The OpenDocument Foundation was two guys without a garage. The OpenDocument Foundation was founded in 2005 (shortly after OASIS approval of ODF 1.0) for the express purpose of balancing out the rapidly growing participation in the ODF technical committee of corporate contributors. IBM, Oracle, Novel, Intel and Adobe led a corporate wave joining the ODF TC following the May 2005 OASIS approval of ODF 1.0 and subsequent submission to ISO. The Foundation was set up to fund the participation of expert individuals representing both open source communities and groups interested in an Open Web future.
Gary Edwards

The Document Interoperability Initiative: "DII" - 0 views

  • Gary Edwards
     
    Vendor - developer group sponsored by Microsoft ... "What's seriously lacking is a conversion or locking of scripts, macros, OLE, data - media bindings, and security settings .... the logic parts so important to any business process or productivity environment setting embedded in the original MSOffice document."
Gary Edwards

OpenXML Viewer Project - 0 views

  • Gary Edwards
     
    Technology Considerations
    The Microsoft OpenXml Viewer is a cross browser cross OS plugin. The core of the application has to be OS independent. Therefore, the application is developed using C++.

    Future possibilities
    The generated html from the docx file can be rendered using silverlight and similar rich platforms. The same can be used in a server scenario to render docx files as html.
  • Gary Edwards
     
    Interesting project based on an XSLT "one-way" conversion from OOXML to HTML. The conversion process will break any kind of business or application specific logic embedded in the document. There is a conversion of VML to SVG that i think will be important to watch.
  • Gary Edwards
     
    What's seriously lacking is a conversion or locking of scripts, macros, OLE, data - media bindings, and security settings .... the logic parts so important to any business process or productivity environment setting embedded in the original MSOffice document.
Gary Edwards

Document Interoperability Initiative Demonstrates Momentum and Results: Industry collaborat... - 0 views

  • Gary Edwards
     
    Through the Document Interoperability Initiative (DII) global forums, technology leaders have been working together to promote interoperability between different document format implementations to provide greater value and choice to customers, and the events - including one held in Belgium this week - are yielding practical results.
    Interoperability solutions announced today translate Open XML documents to a Web page (HTML) allowing readability on Web-friendly browsers such as Firefox, improve translations between different formats through optimized templates, and enable features that provide greater choice for customers and opportunities for independent software developers as they create and use business applications built on Java that manipulate business documents. At the DII events, discussions were also held about developing document test libraries and schema validators, and vendors had the opportunity to test their implementations of document formats in a lab environment to identify potential issues to be addressed.
Gary Edwards

Microsoft OOXML viewers, translators, SDK to help interop with Firefox and OpenOffice? - 0 views

  • Gary Edwards
     
    On Dec 3, Microsoft officially announced the availability of its Open XML Document Viewer, Open XML/ODF Translators Version 2.5 and the Apache POI Java SDKfor OpenXML.
Graham Perrin

IBM, Sun Microsystems Launch ODF Toolkit Union To Grow Adoption, Community and Software Inn... - 0 views

  • Bernard (ben) Tremblay
     
    "November 5, 2008 IBM and Sun Microsystems, Inc. today announced the launch of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) Toolkit Union, a new open-source software community project organized to make document software more innovative, versatile and useful for business."
Bernard (ben) Tremblay

Open Document | Online Community for the OpenDocument OASIS Standard - 0 views

  • Bernard (ben) Tremblay
     
    This is the official community gathering place and information resource for the OpenDocument Format (ODF) OASIS Standard (ISO/IEC 26300). Suitable for text, spreadsheets, charts, graphs, presentations, and databases, ODF frees documents from their applications-of-origin, enabling them to be exchanged, retrieved, and edited with any OpenDocument-compliant software or tool. This is a community-driven site, and the public is encouraged to contribute content.
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