What’s distinctive about the goals of OOXML? Primarily, to have full fidelity with pre-existing binary documents created in Microsoft Office. “What people want is to make sure that their billions of important documents can be saved in a format where they don’t lose any information. As a design goal, we said that those formats have to represent all the information that enables high-fidelity migration from the binary formats”, says Paoli. He mentions work with institutions including the British Library and the US Library of Congress, concerned to preserve the information in their electronic archive.
I asked Paoli if such users could get equally good fidelity by converting their documents to ODF. “Absolutely not,” he says. “I am very clear on that. Those two formats are done for different reasons.”
What can go wrong? Paoli gives as an example the myriad ways borders can be drawn round tables in Microsoft Office and all its legacy versions. “There are 100 ways to draw the lines around a table,” he says. “The Open XML format has them all, but ODF which has not been designed for backward compatibility, does not have them. It’s really the tip of the iceberg. So if someone translates a binary document with a table to ODF, you will lose the framing details. That is just a very small example.”
LOL :: Microsoft's Jean Paoli on the XML document debate - 0 views
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“Open Document Format and Office Open XML have very different goals”, says Paoli, responding to the claim that the world needs only one standard XML format for office documents. “Both of them are formats for documents … both are good.”
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The door should have been slammed shut on OOXML near five years ago when, on December 14th, 2006, at the very first OASIS ODF TC meeting, Stellent's Phil Boutros proposed that the charter include, "compatibility with existing file formats and interoperability with existing applications" as a priority objective.
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I put it to Paoli that OOXML is hard to implement because of all its legacy support, some of which is currently not well documented. “I don’t believe that at all. It’s actually the opposite,” he says. He make the point that third parties like Corel, which have previously implemented support for binary formats like .doc and .xls, should find it easy to transition to OOXML. “We believe Open XML adoption by vendors like Corel will be very easy because they have already been doing 90% of the work, doing the binary formats. The features are already there.”
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Tim Anderson interviews Microsoft's Jean Paoli about MOOXML and ODF. Jean Paoli of course has the predictable set of answers. But Tim anderson provides us with some interesting insights and comments of his own. There is also a gem of a comment from Stephane Rodriquez, the reknown spreadsheet expert.
The bottom line for Microsoft has not changed. MOOXML exists because of the need for an XML file format compatible with the legacy of existing MSOffic ebinary documents. He claims that ODF is not compatible, and offers the "page borders" issue as an example.
Page borders? What's that got to do with the ODF file format? These are application specific, application bound proprietary graphics that can not be ported to any other application - like OpenOffice. The reason has nothign whatsoever to do with ODF and everything to do with the fact that the page border library is bound to MSOffice and not available to other applications like OpenOffice.
So here is an application specific feature tha tJean Paoli claims can not be expressed in ODF, but can in MOOXML. But when are running the da Vinci ODF plugin in MSWord, there is no problem whatsoever in capturing the page borders in ODF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! No problem!!!!!!!!!!
The problem is opening up that same da Vinci MSWord document in OpenOffice. That's where the page borders are dropped. The issue is based entirely on the fact that OpenOffice is unable to render these MSWord specific graphics bound to an MSOffice only library.
If however we take that same page border loaded da Vinci MSWord document, and send it half way across the world to another MSWord desktop running da Vinci, the da Vinci plugin easily loads the ODF document into MSWord where it is perfectly rendered, page borders and all!!!!!!!!
Now i will admit that this is one very difficult issue to understand. If not f -
Great interview. Tim can obviously run circles around poor Jean Paoli.
Florian - libopc libreoffice - 0 views
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Florian is back with another YouTube video. This time demonstrating the wonders of ODF, using his LibOPC library to pump ODF into MSWord. He demonstrates using the LibOPC library to make direct changes to the ODF document that are perfectly reflected in LibreOffice and MSWord, with some noted exceptions. all of which are carefully explained and visually demonstrated. Once again, a nice job by Florian.
Federal future cloudy for Microsoft Word -- Government Computer News - 0 views
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“We have explained [to federal agencies] ways of moving from Microsoft Word to an i4i implementation of custom XML,” said Michael Vuple, i4i’s founder. “If agencies want custom XML, we are prepared, and we are working on a way for them to use our technology.” The company hasn’t been actively marketing that approach to government so far because it didn’t want to take advantage of the current “unfortunate situation,” he said. But with agencies likely to be asking the question, he said i4i will probably have to take a more proactive stance in the future.
Patent Ruling Against Microsoft Hinges on Meaning of Custom XML - 0 views
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Marbux discovered this gem, joining the argument with an insightful but disagreeing post. I however agreed with the articles author, Jeff Cogswell, that both the judge and jury confused the XML pane feature set with metacode mapping claims in the now infamous i4i 449 patent. If Marbux is right, then HTML-CSS, ODF, and RDF/XML-RDFa are also infringing on this patent. Which i4i claims is not the case. Except: Here's one part of the ruling: ... Microsoft Corporation is hereby permanently enjoined from ... selling, offering to sell ... any Infringing and Future Word Products that have the capability of opening a .XML, .DOCX, or .DOCM file ("an XML file") containing custom XML. The odd wording here is "custom XML," which appears several times in the ruling. Based on the comments in response to eWEEK's articles on the ruling, as well as comments I've seen elsewhere, a great deal of people think the problem was that Microsoft uses XML as its format. But that isn't the case. The ruling focuses on the use of custom XML. The ruling is not about the fact that Word uses XML. If it did, there would be a worldwide disaster, considering how prevalent XML is. But what exactly is custom XML? To start with, let's look at the claims of the patent itself and try to make a connection. The patent, which was written back in 1994, covers a new way of providing formatting in a word processing program. To understand the claims of the patent, it's important to note the distinction between what the inventors call content and what are called metacodes (which are ultimately formatting codes).
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What part of "Executive Board" makes you think they read 6,000 page XML specifications? <ge>
I think, in the best bureaucratic tradition, they argued definitions until they convinced themselves that they didn't need to do anything. They decided that one standard contradicts another standard only if the proposed standard causes the existing standard not to work. This is from analogy with the Chinese WAPI WiFi networking standard last year that was defeated because the protocol caused radio interference with existing 801.11 networks. So they said that OOXML did not contradict ODF because both files could exist on the same disk without interfering with each other. You will note that thiss argument can be used for every XML format, every programming language, every operating system, in fact every software standard, since software is ultimately data, and data can be segregated on disks. So they essentially chose a definition so narrow that it nullified the concept of "contradiction" for most of what JTC1 has authority over.<!-- D(["mb","<div><br><span style\u003d\"color:rgb(0, 0, 153)\"><ge> Wait a second. You cannot have a OOXML document and a ODF document sitting on the same disk without having them interfer with each other. We just proved that with our tests of both ACME 374 and ODF Da Vinci plugin on the latest release of MSOffice Word 2007.\n</span><br style\u003d\"color:rgb(0, 0, 153)\"><br style\u003d\"color:rgb(0, 0, 153)\"><span style\u003d\"color:rgb(0, 0, 153)\">OOXML clearly does interfere with the loading of an ODF file into MSWord 2007. In prior versions of MSWord (98, 2000, XP, 2003