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Gary Edwards

Independent study advises IT planners to go OOXML: The Bill Gates MSOffice "formats and... - 0 views

talkback.zdnet.com/5206-12558-0.html

anti-trust browser-wars comes gates iowa msoffice netscape ooxml w3c

shared by Gary Edwards on 30 May 08 - Cached
  • 3.2.2.2. A pox on both your houses! gary.edwards - 01/22/08 Hi Robert, What you've posted are examples of MSOffice ”compatibility settings” used to establish backwards compatibility with older documents, and, for the conversion of alien file formats (such as various versions of WordPerfect .wpd). These compatibility settings are unspecified in that we know the syntax but have no idea of the semantics. And without the semantic description there is no way other developers can understand implementation. This of course guarantees an unacceptable breakdown of interoperability. But i would be hesitant to make my stand of rejecting OOXML based on this issue. It turns out that there are upwards of 150 unspecified compatibility settings used by OpenOffice/StarOffice. These settings are not specified in ODF, but will nevertheless show up in OpenOffice ODF documents – similarly defying interoperability efforts! Since the compatibility settings are not specified or even mentioned in the ODF 1.0 – ISO 26300 specification, we have to go to the OOo source code to discover where this stuff comes from. Check out lines 169-211. Here you will find interesting settings such as, “UseFormerLineSpacing, UseFormerObjectPositioning, and UseFormerTextWrapping”. So what's going on here?
  • From: Bill Gates Sent: Saturday, December 5 1998 To: Bob Muglia, Jon DeVann, Steven Sinofsky Subject : Office rendering "One thing we have got to change in our strategy - allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other peoples browsers is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company. We have to stop putting any effort into this and make sure that Office documents very well depends on PROPRIETARY IE capabilities. Anything else is suicide for our platform. This is a case where Office has to avoid doing something to destroy Windows. I would be glad to explain at a greater length. Likewise this love of DAV in Office/Exchange is a huge problem. I would also like to make sure people understand this as well." Tuesday, August 28, 2007
  • Gary Edwards on 30 May 08
     
    The IOWA Comes vs. Microsoft antitrust suit evidence is now publicly available. This ZDNet Talkback posts an extraordinary eMail from Bill Gates concerning the need to control MSOffice formats and protocols as Microsoft pushes onto the Web. The key point is that Chairman Bill understands that the real threat to Microsoft is that of Open Web formats and protocols outside of Microsoft's control. It's 1998, and the effort to "embrace and eXtend" W3C HTML, XHTML, SVG and CSS isn't working well. The good Chairman notifies the troops that MSOffice must come up with another plan. Interestingly, it's not until 2001, when OpenOffice releases an XML encoding of the OpenOffice/StarOffice imbr that Microsoft finally sees a solution! (imbr = in-memory-binary-representation) The MSOffice crew immediately sets to work creating a similar XML encoding of the MSOffice binary (imbr) dump. The first result is released in the MSOffice 2003 beta as "WordprocessingML and SpreadsheetML". XML was designed as a structured language for creating specific structured languages. OpenOffice saw the potential of using XML to create an OpenOffice specific XML language. MSOffice seized the innovation and the rest is history. Problem solved! So what was the "problem" the good Chairman identified in this secret eMail? It's that the Web is the future, and Microsoft needed to find a way of leveraging their existing desktop document "editor" monopoly share into owning and controlling the Web formats produced by Microsoft applications. MSOffice OOXML is the result. ISO approval of MSOffice OOXML is beyond important to Microsoft. It establishes MSOffice "editors" as standards compliant. It also establishes the application, platform and vendor specific MSOffice OOXML as an international "open" standard. Many will ask why this isn't a case of Microsoft actually opening up the MSOffice formats in compliance with government antitrust demands. It is "compliance", but not in the sense of what
Gary Edwards

BOOK Offered Or Kept: Digital reading without Epub? | TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home - 0 views

www.teleread.org/...t-digital-reading-without-epub

ajax book css ebook epub html-5

shared by Gary Edwards on 30 May 08 - Cached
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 30 May 08
       
      .wiki is the native wikiWORD language for MSOffice "editors". It's really AJAX for documents, with HTML+ handlign the "structure", and CSS+ handling the "presentation". We need javascript to perfect the full range of typographical options used by knowledge workers makign their way from MSOffice to the web. BOOK is a good place to start.
  • The structure of a BOOK would look like this: …BOOK/ ……index.html ……images/ ………cover.png ……css/ ………base.css ………skins/ …………modern.css …………classic.css …………nouveau.css ……scripts/ ………prototype.js ………base.js ………extensions.js
  • As for the Javascript, it’s based on the ECMAScript standard, which has evolved into a strongly-typed, object-oriented programming language and is one of the few web “standards” which really is a standard. BOOK authors will welcome the addition of a scripting language, as it is NOT currently supported in the IDPF specifications. In fact, it’s forbidden for .epub reading systems to execute scripts. It’s also forbidden for them to display a file called index.html without first loading and parsing several other files.
  • ...10 more annotations...
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 30 May 08
       
      Good point! The IDPF ePUB format does not support javascript! Which makes "BOOK" a better format to target.
  • EPub is an excellent, high-fidelity format for both direct rendering and for user-side conversion to other formats for particular platforms such as very limited resource handheld devices.
  • Jon Noring Says:
  • For BOOKs, it offers true pagination, typesetting, skinnable and collapsible layouts, footers and headers, footnotes as popups, inline text, true footer notes, or endnotes . . . the list goes on. YUI, JQuery, dojo, MooTools, and Prototype are just a few of the frameworks available, and they’ve been addressing these issues for some time now.
  • Javascript is useful mainly for rendering, not bells and whistles. Without Javascript, the non-normalized implementations of CSS out there become useless–you can’t rely on them to produce a consistent rendering of a document. Unfortunately, with CSS3 the rendering game is only going to get more complicated. I don’t advocate executing scripts from epubs, I advocate executing scripts in epub reading systems. Two very different things, as you’re aware.
  • Scripting is *essential* for many digital publishing projects and not understanding it is a major failure of IDPF. Saying that “we will reconsider scripting when adoption of epub grows” is also inadequate, because nobody will wait patiently, but will choose some another platform for their publishing needs, Adobe AIR for example.
  • My criticism of epub is not about details but about its fundamentals. It seems to me that while preparing the spec the most fundamental question was left out of view: what is the right model for digital publication: is it a physical book? Or is it something else? If something else, then what? From my point of view, not a physical book, but a website should be thought as the right model. Why website? - because of the well supported and ubiquitous mix of technologies (html, css, javascript) and because of the workflow (publishing early versions of the publication on the website for gathering feedback and then publishing as downloadable file). If a model for a digital publication is a website, then any format which does not allow to have everything which we have on websites and does not allow to take all website’s html, css and client-side scripts and publish them as downloadable file without much changing them, is doomed to failure in the long run. It seems that epub is now on this way to failure.
  • What I’d like to see is a sort of epub spinoff, another specification from the IDPF, if you will, with slightly different requirements. Instead of BOOK, we could call it epub-lite. The basis for this simplified, consumer-oriented version of .epub would be the same browser-centric building blocks under the IDPF specs. The difference would be in the file structure and in the way a browser deals with it.
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 30 May 08
       
      What we really need are "webDOCS". Laisvunas is absolutely right. The web is the target, with print and device "flow" an auxillary offshoot. I think we can have it all, and Aaron's "BOOK" is a good place to start. My thinking though is that javascript has to come from standardized libraries such as jQuery or Yahoo's "BrowserPLUS". Yahoo BrowserPLUS does have a security model and off-line capability built in. It's nowhere near as robust and sweepign as the jQuery javascript library, but i don't see why the two can't be combined. Good thinking on the part of Laisvunas!
  • What I wish for is this: a simple ebook format which allows me to use all technologies there are on the web with exactly the same freedom as on web and imposing no additional limitations. Secondly, some browser-based reader (browser add-on or some program based on some quality browser engine). Thirdly, some program (editor/compiler) for producing publications from preexisting web-pages.
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 30 May 08
       
      Once again Laisvunas nails it. I really like his "AIR" suggestion. It's also true that flowing content ready device browsers like the webKit "Safari" and SkyFire will be far more widespread than any ePUB reader!!!!! So why not write for both the web and the device at the same time?
  • The system I’m referring to is alive and well at bookglutton.com. It features an AJAX reader and Package Creation tool. The package tool is currently part of the upload feature which enables people to convert .doc, .rtf, and html documents to epub packages that can be viewed in the Reader. Once we have more epubs out there, direct epub upload will also be an option. We may also eventually enable epub download. Right now, we’re having some doubts about the value of that.
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 30 May 08
       
      How about "eWEB" as a format name? Is it better than "webBOOK" or webDOC"?
  • Gary Edwards on 30 May 08
     
    Aaron Miller writes about the limitations and difficulties with ePUB. He suggests a new format, "BOOK" based on ePUB but web ready. BOOK is an AJAX format in that it includes (X)HTML, CSS and JavaScript! Excellent stuff! The discussion on this page is one of the best on the Web. ePUB gets thrashed, but with arguments very difficult to contest. The web is everything, and Aaron's friends fully understand this. Sadly, the ePUB crowd does not. I found this site looking to solve the problem of numbered lists in ePUB.
Paul Merrell

Mozilla warns of Flash and Silverlight 'agenda' | Tech News on ZDNet - 0 views

news.zdnet.com/2424-3515_22-199508.html

flash html 5 mozilla silverlight

shared by Paul Merrell on 02 May 08 - Cached
  • Paul Merrell on 02 May 08
     
    Companies building websites should beware of proprietary rich-media technologies like Adobe's Flash and Microsoft's Silverlight, the founder of Mozilla Europe has warned. Speaking at the Internet World conference in London on Tuesday, Tristan Nitot claimed such applications threaten the open nature of the internet because the companies behind them could "have an agenda". While he conceded that Flash was currently necessary for consistently displaying content such as video, he suggested that the upcoming revision of the HTML specification would make it unnecessary to use proprietary technology.
Gary Edwards

Yahoo BrowserPlus™: Web 3.0 - 0 views

browserplus.yahoo.com

css html-5 javascript jquery

shared by Gary Edwards on 30 May 08 - Cached
  • BrowserPlus™ is a technology for web browsers that allows developers to create rich web applications with desktop capabilities.
  • Gary Edwards on 30 May 08
     
    Another JavaSript library concept, but this time secure. Not as robust as jQuery, but Yahoo is off to a great start. wikiWORD could use this for dynamic page generation.
Gary Edwards

Architecture astronauts take over - MS Live Mesh is MS HailStorm in drag | Joel on Soft... - 0 views

www.joelonsoftware.com/...01.html

groove mesh microsoft ozzie synchronization

shared by Gary Edwards on 01 May 08 - Cached
  • But Windows Live Mesh is not just a way to synchronize files. That's just the sample app. It's a whole goddamned architecture, with an API and developer tools and in insane diagram showing all the nifty layers of acronyms, and it seems like the chief astronauts at Microsoft literally expect this to be their gigantic platform in the sky which will take over when Windows becomes irrelevant on the desktop. And synchronizing files is supposed to be, like, the equivalent of Microsoft Write on Windows 1.0. It's Groove, rewritten from scratch, one more time. Ray Ozzie just can't stop rewriting this damn app, again and again and again, and taking 5-7 years each time.
  • Paul Merrell on 01 May 08
     
    Spolsky isn't impressed by MS Live, says Live is just another iteration of technology that has never captured any market uptake.
  • Gary Edwards on 03 May 08
     
    Joel rails on HailStorm and it's latest Ray Ozzie Groove inspired incarnation, "Live Mesh".
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