4. The Reality in the Punchbowl Meanwhile, Sam Hiser offers a different impression of the DIN effort [4]: "The ODF-to-OOXML harmonization effort being hosted by the German standards group, DIN, is Europe's best effort to resolve our Mexican Standoff between Microsoft, Sun and IBM. Even though harmonization is laughably complex and will not work unless the applications are harmonized too, the best and brightest of Germany are left to hope for success." [emphasis mine: dh] Although the mission of the German effort is translation (Übersetzung), not harmonization, I find there is a very important point that is not made often enough: People write, read, and edit office documents with little, if any, understanding of the particular format that makes them persistent in digital form. The XML-based open formats do not change that. People adapt to the software/device they are using by trial and error. We train ourselves to obtain the visible results that we want. Different people obtain superficially similar results by quite different means. Even when someone has gone to the trouble to create style sheets, forms, macros, templates and other format-impacting aids, it is very loosey-goosey in practice. And it still does not require paying attention to the file format.
OOXML was designed for the high fidelity conversion of those billions of legacy MSOffice documents. ODF was not.
What's interesting here is that Andy is correctly pointing out that the ODF vednors refuse to compromise on the innovative ways OpenOffice differs from MSOffice. The innovations involve the different ways OpenOffice implements basic docuemnt structures such as lists, sections, fields, tables and page dynamics. MSOffic euses an older method of implementation.
When converting legacy MSOffice documents to ODF, the fidelity breaks down wherever these strucutral features are present. The key point here is that these strucutral differentials are exactly related to how OpenOffice and MSOffice differ in their implementation methods. it's an application difference beign expressed at the file format level!!!!!!!!!!!
The ODF vendors refuse to compromise with their application level innovations. The result of this is that billions of MSOffice docuemnts cannot be converted to ODF without significant loss of information.
Which is to say: both ODF and OOXML are application specific formats. Worse, neither ODF or OOXML specify the syntax and semantics of layout!!! They only specify the syntax. Developers must study OpenOffice and MSDOffice to figure out how presentation (layout) is achieved.
This stands in stark contrast to the W3C's Compound Document Format (CDF). CDF provides a very generic, application independent separation of content (XHTML) and presentation (CSS), where the presentation layer is entirely specified. CSS is highly portable because it is completely specified and totally application indepen