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Gary Edwards

Brian Jones: Open XML Formats : Specifying the document settings - 0 views

blogs.msdn.com/...ing-the-document-settings.aspx

contradictions ecma eooxml inconsistencies interoperability iso microsoft oasis odf openxml

shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07 - Cached
  • # re: Specifying the document settings @ Thursday, January 11, 2007 5:11 AM Brian, the fact that you are encouraging people not to use those compatibility flags does not matter at all here. There obviously will be documents with those flags turned on, right? Otherwise you wouldn't have put this in the standard. So it's just a corner case, but still: This means ONLY your office suite will be able to display those documents correctly, even if a competing program implemented the whole specification. Why? Because you didn't specify how those flags affect the display of the document (a hell of a specification you have there...). I still haven't seen any answer to this valid criticism. It's a competitive advantage for Microsoft since the standard is incomplete and your company is the only one that has the missing parts. - Stephan Stephan Jaensch
  • Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07
     
    Nice catch by Stephan Jaensch.  He caught Brian Jones trying wriggle out of corner Rob Weir has trapped the mighty Microsoft Blogmeister in.  The last line of Stephan's question to Brian Jones says it all; the incompleteness and undocumented aspects of the EOOXML specification give Microsoft an incredibly unfair competitive advantage regarding the billions of binary MSOffice documents in circulation and vital to critical day to day business operations the world over. 

    The quote from Stephan:  "I still haven't seen any answer to this valid criticism. It's a competitive advantage for Microsoft since the standard is incomplete and your company is the only one that has the missing parts."

    The response from Brian?  We're waiting.  We've been waiting.  With each passing day the EOOXMl specification looks more like a monopolist endagered species protection order than the open standard Microsoft is trying to palm it off as.

Gary Edwards

Link to this site | Open Document - 0 views

opendocument.xml.org/logo

imported:del.icio.us oasis odf xml

shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07
     
    The new logo for the OpenDocument wiki at XML.org is out.  This page also carries a link to OASIS ODF Blogs.  Nothing yet about the controversial MEOOXML submission to ISO that took place on Friday, January 5th, 2007.  The submission triggers the critically important ISO Contradiction Review Phase, where ISO members have 30 days to review the 6,000 page MEOOXML submission and post any allegations of possible contradictions or inconsistencies.

    If MEOOXML (Microsoft-ECMA Office Open XML) can pass through the contradiction without complaint,  the 6,000 page specification describing XML encoding of MSOffice specific binary processes gets to move on to the fast track phase.

    This is very sneaky stuff.  Micrsoft tried to submit MEOOXML to ISO in mid December.  Perhaps in hopes of catching an extra 20 or so days of holiday right in the midst of the critical 30 day contradiction review period.  Apparently the USA representative to ISO JTSC1 refused the submission until after the hollidays.  Still, with near zero publicity, and 6,000 pages of crap to sludge through, the review phase has begun. 

    IMHO, only the ODF experts can effectively point out the ocntradictions and inconsistencies with the MEOOXML submission.  So this is a call for Rob Weir, Florian Reuter, Patrick Durusau, Sam Hiser, David A Wheeler, Bruce D'Arcus, the legendary Daniel Vogelheim, and the infamous Marbux to step forward with the full force of their expertise. 

    Since Florian has the most experience with the hapless and tragically deceptive MS-Novel-CleverAge Translator Project, where the glaringly obvious contradictions and inconsistencies are being hastily pasted over, i'm anxious to see where his blog takes us:
    http://florianreuter.blogspot.com/

    ~ge~

  • ...1 more comment...
  • Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07
     
    The new logo for the OpenDocument wiki at XML.org is out. This page also carries a link to OASIS ODF Blogs. Nothing yet about the controversial MEOOXML submission to ISO that took place on Friday, January 5th, 2007. The submission triggers the critical
  • Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07
     
    The new logo for the OpenDocument wiki at XML.org is out. This page also carries a link to OASIS ODF Blogs. Nothing yet about the controversial MEOOXML submission to ISO that took place on Friday, January 5th, 2007. The submission triggers the critical
  • Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07
     
    The new logo for the OpenDocument wiki at XML.org is out. This page also carries a link to OASIS ODF Blogs. Nothing yet about the controversial MEOOXML submission to ISO that took place on Friday, January 5th, 2007. The submission triggers the critical
Paul Merrell

untitled - 0 views

www.dpawson.co.uk/...090612.html

ODF specificity quality testability

shared by Paul Merrell on 18 Jun 09 - Cached
  • 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.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Rob Weir of IBM chaired (apology for the misuse of that last word) the formation list and then simply announced what the charter would be rather than seeking consensus among the list participants. As part of this process before that charter was produced and while I still naively believed that consensus was a goal, I sat down with ODF 1.1 and did a paragraph-by-paragraph review for testability. The numbers were quite revealing. I completely reviewed only the first four major sections and found very few clear requirements. The majority were mere statements with no normative language used to identify what was required or optional. Implementors would have to make their own interpretation.
  • It's ironic that the chair viewed as good news the fact that there were far fewer testable paragraphs than he had predicted. But his prediction of 10,000 test cases is probably far closer to how many testable paragraphs there should be; my counts were actually bad news.
  • All of the above leads to the interesting question of just how the chair expects to accomplish much that is useful in regard to ODF conformance testing before the specification is amended to tighten up the language and add clear requirements. The syntax conformity is already handled by validation against the schema, but the semantics are woefully under-specified.
  • Summary: ODF 1.1 isn't verifiable as a specification. From a fairly cursory review of the latest draft, ODF 1.2 will follow the same path. With OASIS now being more demanding regarding conformance requirements on every specification and with ISO/IEC taking a closer interest in liaison with the ODF TC, I find it hard to see how the ODF TC co-chairs can maintain this view toward verification.
Alex Brown

Is ODF designed to be not implementable without source code? - Wouter - 0 views

blogs.code-counsel.net/...Post.aspx

shared by Alex Brown on 02 Jun 09 - Cached
  • How come I am the one to notice how deficient ODF really is?
    • Alex Brown
      Alex Brown on 02 Jun 09
       
      "But mummy, he's not *wearing* any clothes ..."
  • Gary Edwards on 02 Jun 09
     
    Exactly! It's not that ODF is under-specified. It's that ODF can't be fully specified until OpenOffice is completely documented and capable of supporting expected features. There is this famous quote from Sun's Svante Schubert that pretty much says it all; "Nothing goes into the ODF specification unless it's supported by OpenOffice". The statement was made at a meeting of the OASIS ODF Metadata SC while discussing the controversial use of "XML ID". IBM's Elias Torres, of RDFa fame, was passionately arguing that use of the XML ID should be left open to all developers. Sun had taken the position that XML ID should be limited to only a handful of elements supported by OpenOffice. The discussion acutally got far worse than the quote would indicate. Elias compromised his arguments suggesting that we should allow developers to have at it with XML ID for at least one year, and then revisit the issue. This suggestion lead to a discussion of how developers implementing elements with metadata would notify the metadata sub committee of their use case. A discussion list was proposed. The idea being that developers would send in their use cases and the oligarchs on the sub c would approve or disprove. Incredibly, this suggestions was shot down by Bruce d'Arcus (OpenDocument Foundation). Bruce thought that any developer needing metadata support for particular elements should have to join the OASIS ODF Metadata SC like everyone else before their needs would be considered. ( i.e. - like the other oligarchs). At the next weeks meeting, Rob Weir showed up with a list of 14 spreadsheet related elements that IBM needed XML ID support for. Sun representatives Svante Schubert and Michael Brauer immediately approved the use, agreeing that OpenOffice would support that implementation. This how things work at OASIS ODF. Ever wonder why SVG or XForms support in ODF is so limited? It's because the specification directly reflects the limits of the OpenOffice implement
  • Gary Edwards on 02 Jun 09
     
    Sorry. Diigo cut my comment off about half way through. I've complained to Wade and Maggie about this problem, especially how it impacts and cripples the "Group Auto-Blog Post" feature . Months have gone by. Yet still the issue remains.
Alex Brown

Dr AJG's Commentary » Rob Weir…Going after Microsoft? - 0 views

ajg.math.concordia.ab.ca/?p=4

shared by Alex Brown on 14 May 09 - Cached
  • It ahs been clear for a along time that the ODF standard primarily tries to codify various implementations and as such does not guarantee interoperability. Why blame Microsoft if their implementation does not further interoperability either? The writers of the ODF standard are to blame.
    • Alex Brown
      Alex Brown on 14 May 09
       
      well, quite
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