Matusow sounds reasonable only if you are not a file format
congnoscenti. He uses an appeal to ignorance. A single universal set of formats is entirely feasible from a technical standpoint; e.g., the example of HTML. But the chances of getting there by opening application-specific formats are dim at best, as the ODF experience teaches. You might acquire an entirely different perspective if you spent some time viewing the short sets of slides from the IDABC Open Document Exchange Formats Workshop 2007, which laid down the market requirements for 21 European government IT national bodies.
http://ec.europa.eu/idabc/en/document/6474 (.) I particularly recommend Dr. Barbara Held's report to the plenary session linked from this page,
http://ec.europa.eu/idabc/en/document/6704/5935 and the four workshop reports linked from the bottom of this page,
http://ec.europa.eu/idabc/en/document/6702/5935 (.) Those slides reflect a lot of careful research into the issue you and Matusow discuss.
Group Bookmarks tagged ms-ooxml
Gary Edwards (332)
mazyar hedayat (3)
marbux (1)
Uh OH! Look what Microsoft has put into the new .NET 3.0 SDK! Flow Documents is a Microsoft specific version of HTML that is part of the Windows Presentation Foundation Browser Developers Framework. XAML - XPS-XABL.
It also looks as though Microsoft has reserved MS-OOXML MSOffice level integration for themselves.
Another thought is that MSOffice is being positioned as a developers framework for Web 2.0 development. This docuemnt is goign to take some serious study. Bad news for IBM and Adobe for sure. PDF, Flash and AJAX are all going to be in the fight of their lives.
The conversion tools are going to become of critical importance. Some initial thoughts are that we could convert MSOffice documents to CDF+; convert OpenOffice documents to CDF+; and convert Flow Documents to CDF+, using the same XHTML 2.0 - CSS desktop profile (WICD Full). Converting MS-OOXML to Flow Documents however appears to be next to impossible by design. The easy approach would be to let the da Vinci plug-in perfect an internal conversion to either CDF+ or Flow.
It will be interesting to see if Microsoft provides a Flow plug-in for MSOffice. I doubt it, but perhaps there will be a demand from Flow developers. da Vinci could of course be configured to produce Flow Documents. At first glance, my assumption would be that the ability to convert native MSOffice documents and allication genrated Flow Documents to CDF+ would be the most important course to take. We''ll see. This is no doubt explosive stuff. Microsoft is truly challenging the W3C for the Web.