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# re: Office Open XML final draft!!! @ Wednesday, October 11, 2006 1:46 PM The past incarnations of DrawingML have been chaotic. It would be interesting, out of curiosity, to get an accurate history of what changed over time, perhaps to better understand what is supported in what. Here is my take, I am pretty sure I got at least 50% of it wrong :-) - pre-Windows 95 era, Word, Excel and Powerpoint use their own vector drawing layer used to draw shapes, pictures, diagrams, art and charts. Powerpoint, acquired by Microsoft in 1987, has by far the advanced drawing layer (bi-linear gradients, opacity, ...), codenamed Escher (in reference of the famous mathematician). - In Office 95, it is decided to reuse the Powerpoint vector graphics layer in Word and Excel. Migration begins. - Migration ends with Office 97 where both Word, Excel and Powerpoint use the same vector graphics layer, publicly known as MSO (mso97.dll) - In Office 2000, it's all craze about internet and Word tries to export WYSIWYG html. For that end, mark up extensions must be added to account for the MSO drawing layer. Hence the VML (Vector Markup language). Excel and Powerpoint don't support it. Internet Explorer natively supports VML (Internet Explorer's Direct animation vector drawing layer dismissed for performance reasons). - In Office XP, VML migration ends and both Word, Excel and Powerpoint support VML whenever a document is saved as a "Single web page archive" (.mhtml extension). - In Office 2003, nothing changes. - In Office 12, MSO gets rewritten with backwards compatibility in mind. The vector drawing layer uses more sophisticated drawing functionalities which makes it easier to draw themed, 3D realistic  objects. Technically, the differences are akin to the differences between GDI and GDI+. This new shared library is known as E2O and the corresponding mark up language is known as Drawing ML (Ecma TC45 specs). - In Office 14, ??? perhaps the drawing layer is rewritten, again, to 1) use WPF 2) to allow plugins, hence enabling much more sophisticated do-it-yourself scenarios. Use cases : custom charts ; BI analysis tools. Stephane Rodriguez

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.

Backward Incompatibility Also contributing to Microsoft's goal of putting everybody on a perpetual upgrade cycle is the backward incompatibility in Microsoft's products. Once a small number of users adopt a new version of a Microsoft product all other users are pressured to upgrade lest they are unable to interact with files produced by the newer program. Dan Martinez summed up the situation created with the incompatibility in subsequent versions of Word when he said "while we're on the subject of file formats, let's pause for a moment in frank admiration of the way in which Microsoft brazenly built backward-incompatibility into its product. By initially making it virtually impossible to maintain a heterogenous environment of Word 95 and Word 97 systems, Microsoft offered its customers that most eloquent of arguments for upgrading: the delicate sound of a revolver being cocked somewhere just out of sight." (cited from the quote file) For a more detailed lament of how Microsoft likes to pressure its customers to keep buying the same product over and over by using backward incompatibility, see Zeid Nasser's page on 'Forced upgrading,' in the World of Word.

The short version of the story so many are talking about today: A Texas judge is barring Microsoft from selling Microsoft Word due to alleged patent infringement and fining the Redmondians multiple millions as part of the case. But most synopses of the case seem to be omitting a key part of the ruling: the concept of “Custom XML.” According to the press release from the lawyers for plaintiff i4i: “Today’s permanent injunction prohibits Microsoft from selling or importing to the United States any Microsoft Word products that have the capability of opening .XML, .DOCX or DOCM files (XML files) containing custom XML.” What is “Custom XML”? Is it a (supposedly) unremo

"The implications going forward are immense," i4i Chairman Loudon Owen said. "We were accused initially of wanting to shut down Word. We don't want to shut down Word, we want to open it up."

“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.

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.”

“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.”

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.”

An intriguing idea is whether we can have it both ways. Suppose you are in an ODF editor and you have a "Save for archiving..." option that would save your ODF document as normal, but also generate a PDF version of it and store it in the zip archive along with ODF's XML streams. Then digitally sign the archive along with a time stamp to make it tamper-proof. You would need to define some additional access conventions, but you could end up with a single document that could be loaded in an ODF editor (in read-only mode) to allow examination of the details of spreadsheet formulas, etc., as well as loaded in a PDF reader to show exactly how it was formated.