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The marbux comment:

See particularly section 6.8 and its discussion of "etiquettes," which sounds like CDF profiles to me.

This 1998 academic paper on open standards could give us a solid foundation to build our arguments for Universal Interop from. I may have forwarded this link before, roughly a year ago. Here is the abstract of the paper:

This paper develops the argument that many Information Technology standardization processes are in transition from being controlled by standards creators to being controlled by standards implementers. The users of standardized implementations also have rights that they wish addressed. Ten basic rights of standards creators, implementers and users are identified and quantified. Each of these ten rights represents an aspect of Open Standards. Only when all ten rights are supported will standards be open to all.

it builds upon a previous work by Bruce Perens. Well worth the read.

Standardisation is one of the key facilitators for interoperability of networks, services and equipment. Interoperability in this sense has gained increasing attention and demand inthe market-place. Thus, in response to market-driven needs interoperability is becomingan important requirement in standards projects.This white paper examines the standards development process as well as the actors involved and proposes a set of recommendations in standards development that will help to address interoperability challenges that may occur and can be observed instandardisation. At the same time it provides an agreed industry position on key aspects for standards development. Observing these recommendations - as is done by a lot of actors in standardisation already, including formally established standards setting bodies - may help to increase the level of interoperability in standardisation. This white paper aims at strengthening the awareness to observe interoperability issues at an early stage and make those issues an important consideration as part of the standards-setting process. EICTA's recommendations for the standards development process:

Marbux nails it again in the comments section of this obscure review. In particular, he sites Shah, Rajiv C. and Kesan, Jay P., Lost in Translation: Interoperability Issues for Open Standards - ODF and OOXML as Examples (September 2008), Link to paper on SSRN (compatibility fidelity comparisons of ODF implementations testing only a very small set of word processing features). "...Switching documents, I go through similar travails with the published ODF 1.1 specification, using both the PDF and ODT versions. Bottom line: I can't get either document into WordPerfect X3 or X4 using any rich text format. So I convert the document to plain text using Symphony and get my work done. That is the real state of ODF interoperability. There is no such thing. But that does not stop the vested interests from claiming that there is. E.g.:"

Good article from Aaron Ricadela. The focus is on Java, Sun's hardware-Server business, and Oracle's business objectives. No mention of OpenOffice or ODf though. There is however an interesting quote from IBM regarding the battle between Java and Microsoft .NET. Also, no mention of a OpenOffice-Java Foundation that would truly open source these technologies.

When we were involved with the Massachusetts Pilot Study and ODF Plug-in proposals, IBM and Oracle lead the effort to open source the da Vinci plug-in. They put together a group of vendors known as "the benefactors", with the objective of completing work on da Vinci while forming a patent pool - open source foundation for all OpenOffice and da Vinci source. This idea was based on the Eclipse model.

One of the more interesting ideas coming out of the IBM-Oracle led "benefactors", was the idea of breaking OpenOffice into components that could then be re-purposed by the Eclipse community of developers. The da Vinci plug-in was to be the integration bridge between Eclipse and the Microsoft Office productivity environment. Very cool. And no doubt IBM and Oracle were in synch on this in 2006. The problem was that they couldn't convince Sun to go along with the plan.

Sun of course owned both Java and OpenOffice, and thought they could build a better ODF plug-in for OpenOffice (and own that too). A year later, Sun actually did produce an ODF plug-in for MSOffice. it was sent to Massachusetts on July 3rd, 2007, and tested against the same set of 150 critical documents da Vinci had to successfully convert without breaking. The next day, July 4th, Massachusetts announced their decision that they would approve the use of both ODF and OOXML! The much hoped for exclusive ODF requirement failed in Massachusetts exactly because Sun insisted on their way or the highway.

Let's hope Oracle can right the ship and get OpenOffice-ODF-Java back on track.

"......To gain

It fIts just fine for most of the spec but there are also major chunks that include descriptive element and attribute names, for example, the compatibilIty markup volume. My sense is that these are areas where new features were introduced in Office 2007. But they kind of fly in the face of the Microsoft claims back when that the abbreviated markup was deliberately chosen to maximize execution speed. If so, why isn't all the markup in abbreviated form?

Interesting article discussing the many ways Microsoft is using to improve the public perception that they are serious about interoperability and open formats, protocols and interfaces. Rocketman attended the recent ISO SC34 meeting in Prague and agrees that Microsoft has indeed put on a new public face filled with cooperation, compliance and unheard of sincerity.

He also says, "Don't be fooled!!!"

There is a big difference between participation in vendor consortia and government sponsored public standards efforts, and, actual implementation at the product level. Looking at how Microsoft products implement open standards, my take is that they have decided on a policy of end user choice. Their applications offer on the one hand the choice of aging, near irrelevant and often crippled open standards. And on the other, the option of very rich and feature filled but proprietary formats, protocols and interfaces that integrate across the entire Microsoft platform of desktop, devices and servers. For instance; IE8 supports 1998 HTML-CSS, but not the advanced ACiD-3 "HTML+" used by WebKit, Firefox, Opera and near every device or smartphone operating at the edge of the Web. (HTML+ = HTML5, CSS4, SVG/Canvas, JS, JS Libs).

But they do offer advanced .NET-WPF proprietary alternative to Open Web HTML+. These include XAML, Silverlight, XPS, LINQ, Smart Tags, and OOXML. Very nice.

"When an open source advocate, open standards advocate, or, well, pretty much anyone that competes with Microsoft (news, site) sees an extended hand from the software giant toward better interoperability, they tend to look and see if the other hand's holding a spiked club.

Even so, the Redmond, WA company continues to push the message that it has seen the light regarding open standards and interoperability...."

ODF was created on the principles that interoperability and innovation were paramount, and that these are based on open standards. Not coincidentally, ODF's creation coincided with the growing support of open ICT architectures, which grew from the Web model where the standardization of HTML, an open, royalty-free standard, enabled the Web to be an open platform that enabled much innovation on top of it. The key was interoperability, or the ability of multiple parties to communicate electronically, without the need to all run the same application software or operating system. Also critical to the development of ODF was the introduction of OpenOffice.org, the open source office suite that first implemented the format, and the rise of XML as a widely supported foundational standard for describing structured data.

REST creator Roy Fielding weighs in on CMIS, the Content Management Interoperability Services standard proposed by pay-to-play OASIS members and big RDBMS vendors; EMC, IBM and Microsoft.  Note, Roy works for Day Software, which has been acquired by Adobe. The CMIS proposal is suspiciously similar to the Sursen UOML OASIS Standard that ISO rejected!!!  excerpt: CMIS is a thin veneer on RDBMS-based data repositories that provides a data model for document-like objects within filesystem-like folders, basic file versioning, and access via SQL queries and local object references. it is exactly the kind of document model one would expect within a legacy document management system that is backed by a large relational database and authored via Microsoft Office applications. No surprise, given the sponsors, and there are plenty of good reasons why folks would want to support such data models.

excerpt:  This could be Apple's new internet strategy that thrusts more of us into the next phase of what is now known as the Post-PC era. In my view, this breakthrough could be a game changer.   The Problem to Solve The recent proliferation of web browsers and computer networks has made it easy to display the same document on different computing platforms. However, inconsistencies in the way fonts are rendered across different computing platforms could cause the same document to be rendered differently for users of different computing platforms. More specifically, for a given font, the way in which metrics for various font features are interpreted, such as character height, width, leading and white space, can differ between computing platforms. These differences in interpretation could cause individual characters in a document to be rendered at different locations, which could ultimately cause the words in a document to be positioned differently between lines and pages on different computing platforms.   This inconsistent rendering could be a problem for people who are collaborating on a document. For example, if one collaborator points out an error on a specific line of a specific page, another collaborator viewing the same document on a different computing platform may have to first locate the error on a different line of a different page. Hence, what is needed is a technique for providing consistent rendering for documents across different computer systems and computing platforms. Apple's patent application describe a system that typesets and renders a document in a platform-independent manner. During operation, the system first obtains the document, wherein the document includes text content and associated style information including one or more fonts. The system also generates platform-independent font metrics for the one or more fonts, wherein the platform-independent font metrics include information that could be used to determine the positions of i

The ripples from the European Commission v. Microsoft decision continue to flow. The catch, of course, is that the patent rights will almost certainly be subject to the Microsoft Open Specification Promise, a weasel-worded document that actually grants no rights. http://law.bepress.com/unswwps/flrps/art71/ But someone with some clout will push that issue sooner or later.

referred from http://identi.ca/notice/14365521

Although you need Chrome for the new Google Docs pagination feature, the key here is that gDocs now supports the CSS3 pagination module!   excerpt: Today, we're doing another first for web browsers by adding a classic word processing feature-pagination, the ability to see visual pages on your screen. We're also using pagination and some of Chrome's capabilities to improve how printing works in Google Docs. Native Printing: Pagination also changes what's possible with printing in modern browsers. We've worked closely with the Chrome team to implement a recent web standard, CSS3, so we can support a feature called native printing. Before, if you wanted to print your document we'd need to first convert it into a PDF, which you would then need to open and print yourself. With native printing, you can print directly from your browser and the printed document will always exactly match what you see on your screen.

Good review of Florian's work on the libOPC project!  Sadly i wrote a lengthy comment on this, but then made the mistake of sending it to Facebook where they clipped off 80% of what i had written.  Huge mistake on my part.  Facebook continues to piss me off in ever new and innovative ways.

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