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Under a strategy called "Beyond Office," IBM is developing several technologies to make Symphony an extensible development platform for business applications and Web-based document editors. Rather than compete head-to-head with Microsoft Office, IBM's strategy is to make documents act like "containers" for information within workflow and collaboration applications, according to IBM executives. The plan also calls for IBM to make documents based on the Open Document standard available through Web browsers using Adobe Flash or HTML. On Wednesday, IBM opened a Web site called Bluehouse where small business people can access hosted Web applications for sharing documents.

"Open document formats: I get it! But how do I get there? Discuss."

Don't forget about HTML

February 25, 2007

HTML’s potential and actual suitability for much document interchange

I had read the essay by Jon Bosak (SUN Microsystems) on why SUN voted as it did in the US. He lays out a very different strategy. His view is that the battle is lost to completely reject OOXML as an ISO standard. ISO can only reject it with comments, and that is equivalent to giving Microsoft a todo-list on how to fix the draft so as to get it approved. Microsoft has sufficient manpower to easily tackle that. Most of us had missed what Mr. Bosak saw: OOXML promises interoperability with earlier closed binary formats (the Word Doc, older Excel file formats etc.). But it doesn’t deliver. How on earth could someone be able to convert old binary files to the new format without having the specification of the old formats and a mapping to OOXML. If you are to translate some text from Chinese to English, it doesn’t much help to only know English.

“Ah c’mon Bosak, you are chickening out, we must stop this dead in the track”

In a new setback to Microsoft's public sector business, the influential National Institute of Standards and Technology has banned the software maker's Windows Vista operating system from its internal computing networks, according to an agency document obtained by InformationWeek.

By Marbux posted Jun 19, 2007 - 3:16 PM Asellus sez: "I will not say OOXML is easy to implement, but saying ODF is easier to implement just by looking at the ISO specification is a fallacy." I shouldn't respond to trolls, but I will this time. Asellus is simply wrong. Large hunks of Ecma 376 are simply undocumented. And what's more, absolutely no vendor has a featureful app that writes to that format. Not even Microsoft. There's a myth that Ecma 376 is the same as the Office Open XML used by Microsoft. It is not. I've spend a few hundred hours comparing the Ecma 376 specification (the version of OOXML being considered at ISO) to the information about the undocumented APIs used by MS Office 2007 that recently sprung loose in litigation. See http://www.groklaw.net/p...Rpt_Andrew_Schulman.pdf Each of those APIs *should* have corresponding metadata in the formats, but are not in the Ecma 376 specification.

I think that contradicts the SISSL :-)

Editor's Note: This is the third in a series of articles that examine why the ODF Foundation closed down. The leaders of the recently shuttered OpenDocument Foundation have moved their attention and efforts away from the Open Document Format and towards the W3C's Compound Document Format, which they believe will be able to neutralize Microsoft Office by repurposing those documents.

The Open Document Foundation (ODF) has quietly ended all work on its da Vinci project after failing to secure approval from the Organisation for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS). The da Vinci project was to develop a class of plug-ins that would allow users "to create and edit CDF (compound document format) files in their existing Microsoft Office installations". That is to say, a user could save a .odt file within Word as easily as if it were a .doc format. document.write('\x3Cscript src="http://ad.uk.doubleclick.net/adj/reg.software.4159/applications;'+RegExCats+GetVCs()+'pid='+RegId+';'+RegKW+'maid='+maid+';test='+test+';pf='+RegPF+';dcove=d;sz=336x280;tile=3;ord=' + rand + '?" type="text/javascript">\x3C\/script>'); However, the organisation now says all work has ceased because OASIS has not granted approval of its generic extensions. Without this approval, ODF says: "We can not effectively convert existing Microsoft documents, applications and processes to ODF. The loss of fidelity and feature - business process specific information is too great."

Five years after it was formed specifically to promote OpenDocument Format as an alternative to Microsoft Office formats, those behind the Open Document Foundation are abandoning the OASIS- and ISO-approved document standard in favor of the World Wide Web Consortium’s Compound Document Format.

There’s some weight to that accusation when you consider how the applications behind each format operate. For instance, Microsoft Office more or less sucks at handling ODF documents and OpenOffice sucks at opening OOXML files — but why? OpenOffice has largely refused to implement any of the proprietary elements of Microsoft’s Office and Microsoft has made only a passing effort at supporting ODF. The two sides may argue about which is the better file format, but in reality what they’re saying is “our software works better than yours.” From an end user point of view software remains the critical issue — far moreso than the document format itself. But the OpenDocument Foundation would like that to change, they believe that interoperability is the whole point of having a universal format.

But it is nice to see that at least some part of office document debate is actually on the real-world user’s side. After all, most of us really don’t care what format our documents are in as long as all our applications can open them. And right now that sort of cross-application compatibility is little more than a pipe dream.

The OpenDocument Foundation has announced its plans to sever itself from participation in or further advocacy of its namesake office document format in favor of the World Wide Web Consortium's XHTML (Extensible HTML)-based Compound Document Format. Although the OpenDocument Foundation is a fairly small organization, the group sports a certain cachet that stems from the ODF-to-MS Office plug-in that the group announced--but did not release publicly--about a year and a half ago. At the heart of the rift between the Foundation and the rest of the ODF backers--led by Sun and IBM--lies a dispute over the proper strategy for achieving round-trip document fidelity between Microsoft Office and ODF-consuming applications, such as Sun's OpenOffice.org or IBM's Lotus Symphony.

Subject: Suggested ODF1.2 items From: "Florian Reuter" <freuter@novell.com> To: <office@lists.oasis-open.org> Date: Mon, 20 Nov 2006 17:03:24 +0100

Unlike screw threads, which are easily implemented with complete fidelity, it is sometimes only feasible to create a standard for software that, in a given case, at best will enable two products to become close to interoperable.  After that, tinkering and testing is necessary to accomplish the final "fit."  Similarly, the costs to innovation in achieving true "plug and play" interoperability when that result is feasible may be unacceptably high, leading to a decision to create a standard that (like ODF) only locks in a very significant amount of functionality, rather than complete uniformity (as OOXML strives to achieve).

# 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