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Gary Edwards

XML Production Workflows? Start with the Web and XHTML - 0 views

quod.lib.umich.edu/...n-workflows-start-with-the-web

OpenWeb XML XHTML-CSS HTML5-CSS3-JavaScript IDML

shared by Gary Edwards on 07 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Challenges: Some Ugly Truths The challenges of building—and living with—an XML workflow are clear enough. The return on investment is a long-term proposition. Regardless of the benefits XML may provide, the starting reality is that it represents a very different way of doing things than the one we are familiar with. The Word Processing and Desktop Publishing paradigm, based on the promise of onscreen, WYSIWYG layout, is so dominant as to be practically inescapable. It has proven really hard to get from here to there, no matter how attractive XML might be on paper. A considerable amount of organizational effort and labour must be expended up front in order to realize the benefits. This is why XML is often referred to as an “investment”: you sink a bunch of time and money up front, and realize the benefits—greater flexibility, multiple output options, searching and indexing, and general futureproofing—later, over the long haul. It is not a short-term return proposition. And, of course, the returns you are able to realize from your XML investment are commensurate with what you put in up front: fine-grained, semantically rich tagging is going to give you more potential for searchability and recombination than a looser, more general-purpose approach, but it sure costs more. For instance, the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is the grand example of pouring enormous amounts of energy into the up-front tagging, with a very open-ended set of possibilities down the line. TEI helpfully defines a level to which most of us do not have to aspire.[5] But understanding this on a theoretical level is only part of the challenge. There are many practical issues that must be addressed. Software and labour are two of the most critical. How do you get the content into XML in the first place? Unfortunately, despite two decades of people doing SGML and XML, this remains an ugly question.
  • Practical Challenges In 2009, there is still no truly likeable—let alone standard—editing and authoring software for XML. For many (myself included), the high-water mark here was Adobe’s FrameMaker, substantially developed by the late 1990s. With no substantial market for it, it is relegated today mostly to the tech writing industry, unavailable for the Mac, and just far enough afield from the kinds of tools we use today that its adoption represents a significant hurdle. And FrameMaker was the best of the breed; most of the other software in decent circulation are programmers’ tools—the sort of things that, as Michael Tamblyn pointed out, encourage editors to drink at their desks. The labour question represents a stumbling block as well. The skill-sets and mind-sets that effective XML editors need have limited overlap with those needed by literary and more traditional production editors. The need to think of documents as machine-readable databases is not something that comes naturally to folks steeped in literary culture. In combination with the sheer time and effort that rich tagging requires, many publishers simply outsource the tagging to India, drawing a division of labour that spans oceans, to put it mildly. Once you have XML content, then what do you do with it? How do you produce books from it? Presumably, you need to be able to produce print output as well as digital formats. But while the latter are new enough to be generally XML-friendly (e-book formats being largely XML based, for instance), there aren’t any straightforward, standard ways of moving XML content into the kind of print production environments we are used to seeing. This isn’t to say that there aren’t ways of getting print—even very high-quality print—output from XML, just that most of them involve replacing your prepress staff with Java programmers.
  • Why does this have to be so hard? It’s not that XML is new, or immature, or untested. Remember that the basics have been around, and in production, since the early 1980s at least. But we have to take account of a substantial and long-running cultural disconnect between traditional editorial and production processes (the ones most of us know intimately) and the ways computing people have approached things. Interestingly, this cultural divide looked rather different in the 1970s, when publishers were looking at how to move to digital typesetting. Back then, printers and software developers could speak the same language. But that was before the ascendancy of the Desktop Publishing paradigm, which computerized the publishing industry while at the same time isolating it culturally. Those of us who learned how to do things the Quark way or the Adobe way had little in common with people who programmed databases or document-management systems. Desktop publishing technology isolated us in a smooth, self-contained universe of toolbars, grid lines, and laser proofs. So, now that the reasons to get with this program, XML, loom large, how can we bridge this long-standing divide?
  • ...44 more annotations...
  • Using the Web as a Production Platform The answer, I think, is right in front of you. The bridge is the Web, a technology and platform that is fundamentally based on XML, and which many publishers are by now comfortably familiar with. Perhaps not entirely comfortably, but at least most publishers are already working with the Web; they already either know or have on staff people who understand it and can work with it. The foundation of our argument is this: rather than looking at jumping to XML in its full, industrial complexity, which seems to be what the O'Reilly-backed StartWithXML initiative[6] is suggesting, publishers instead leverage existing tools and technologies—starting with the Web—as a means of getting XML workflows in place. This means making small investments and working with known tools rather than spending tens of thousands of dollars on XML software and rarefied consultants. It means re-thinking how the existing pieces of the production toolchain fit together; re-thinking the existing roles of software components already in use. It means, fundamentally, taking the Web seriously as a content platform, rather than thinking of it as something you need to get content out to, somehow. If nothing else, the Web represents an opportunity to think about editorial and production from outside the shrink-wrapped Desktop Publishing paradigm.
  • Is the Web made of Real XML? At this point some predictable objections can be heard: wait a moment, the Web isn’t really made out of XML; the HTML that makes up most of the Web is at best the bastard child of SGML, and it is far too flaky/unstructured/underpowered to be taken seriously. We counter by arguing that although HTML on the Web exists in a staggering array of different incarnations, and that the majority of it is indeed an unstructured mess, this does not undermine the general principle that basic, ubiquitous Web technologies can make a solid platform for content management, editorial process, and production workflow.
  • With the advent of a published XML standard in the late 1990s came the W3C’s adoption of XHTML: the realization of the Web’s native content markup as a proper XML document type. Today, its acceptance is almost ubiquitous, even while the majority of actual content out there may not be strictly conforming. The more important point is that most contemporary Web software, from browsers to authoring tools to content management systems (from blogs to enterprise systems), are capable of working with clean, valid XHTML. Or, to put the argument the other way around, clean, valid XHTML content plays absolutely seamlessly with everything else on the Web.[7]
  • The objection which follows, then, will be that even if we grant that XHTML is a real XML document type, that it is underpowered for “serious” content because it is almost entirely presentation (formatting) oriented; it lacks any semantic depth. In XHTML, a paragraph is a paragraph is a paragraph, as opposed to a section or an epigraph or a summary.
  • n contrast, more “serious” XML document types like DocBook[8] or DITA-derived schemas[9] are capable of making semantic distinctions about content chunks at a fine level of granularity and with a high degree of specificity.
  • So there is an argument for recalling the 80:20 rule here. If XHTML can provide 80% of the value with just 20% of the investment, then what exactly is the business case for spending the other 80% to achieve that last 20% of value? We suspect the ratio is actually quite a bit steeper than 80:20 for most publishers.
  • IDML is a well thought-out XML standard that achieves two very different goals simultaneously: it preserves all of the information that InDesign needs to do what it does; and it is broken up in a way that makes it possible for mere mortals (or at least our Master of Publishing students) to work with it.
  • XHTML, on the other hand, is supported by a vast array of quotidian software, starting with the ubiquitous Web browser. For this very reason, XHTML is in fact employed as a component part of several more specialized document types (ONIX and ePub among them).
  • Why re-invent a general-purpose prose representation when XHTML already does the job?
  • It is worth pausing for a moment to consider the role of XHTML in the ePub standard for ebook content. An ePub file is, anatomically, a simply disguised zip archive. Inside the zip archive are a few standard component parts: there are specialized files that declare metadata about the book, and about the format of the book. And then there is the book’s content, represented in XHTML. An ePub book is a Web page in a wrapper.
  • To sum up the general argument: the Web as it already exists presents incredible value to publishers, as a platform for doing XML content management with existing (and often free) tools, and without having to go blindly into the unknown. At this point, we can offer a few design guidelines: prefer existing and/or ubiquitous tools over specialized ones wherever possible; prefer free software over proprietary systems where possible; prefer simple tools controlled and coordinated by human beings over fully automated (and therefore complex) systems; play to our strengths: use Web software for storing and managing content, use layout software for layout, and keep editors and production people in charge of their own domains.
  • Putting the Pieces Together: A Prototype
  • At the SFU Master of Publishing Program, we have been chipping away at this general line of thinking for a few years. Over that time, Web content management systems have been getting more and more sophisticated, all the while getting more streamlined and easier to use. (NB: if you have a blog, you have a Web content management system.) The Web is beginning to be recognized as a writing and editing environment used by millions of people. And the ways in which content is represented, stored, and exchanged online have become increasingly robust and standardized.
  • The missing piece of the puzzle has been print production: how can we move content from its malleable, fluid form on line into the kind of high-quality print production environments we’ve come to expect after two decades of Desktop Publishing?
  • Anyone who has tried to print Web content knows that the existing methods leave much to be desired (hyphenation and justification, for starters). In the absence of decent tools for this, most publishers quite naturally think of producing the print content first, and then think about how to get material onto the Web for various purposes. So we tend to export from Word, or from Adobe, as something of an afterthought.
  • While this sort of works, it isn’t elegant, and it completely ignores the considerable advantages of Web-based content management.
  • Content managed online is stored in one central location, accessible simultaneously to everyone in your firm, available anywhere you have an Internet connection, and usually exists in a much more fluid format than Word files. If only we could manage the editorial flow online, and then go to print formats at the end, instead of the other way around. At SFU, we made several attempts to make this work by way of the supposed “XML import” capabilities of various Desktop Publishing tools, without much success.[12]
  • In the winter of 2009, Adobe solved this part of the problem for us with the introduction of its Creative Suite 4. What CS4 offers is the option of a complete XML representation of an InDesign document: what Adobe calls IDML (InDesign Markup Language).
  • The IDML file format is—like ePub—a simply disguised zip archive that, when unpacked, reveals a cluster of XML files that represent all the different facets of an InDesign document: layout spreads, master pages, defined styles, colours, and of course, the content.
  • What this represented to us in concrete terms was the ability to take Web-based content and move it into InDesign in a straightforward way, thus bridging Web and print production environments using existing tools and skillsets, with a little added help from free software.
  • Such a workflow—beginning with the Web and exporting to print—is surely more in line with the way we will do business in the 21st century, where the Web is the default platform for reaching audiences, developing content, and putting the pieces together. It is time, we suggest, for publishers to re-orient their operations and start with the Web.
  • We would take clean XHTML content, transform it to IDML-marked content, and merge that with nicely designed templates in InDesign.
  • The result is an almost push-button publication workflow, which results in a nice, familiar InDesign document that fits straight into the way publishers actually do production.
  • Tracing the steps To begin with, we worked backwards, moving the book content back to clean XHTML.
  • The simplest method for this conversion—and if you want to create Web content, this is an excellent route—was to use Adobe’s “Export to Digital Editions” option, which creates an ePub file.
  • Recall that ePub is just XHTML in a wrapper, so within the ePub file was a relatively clean XHTML document. It was somewhat cleaner (that is, the XHTML tagging was simpler and less cluttered) than InDesign’s other Web-oriented exports, possibly because Digital Editions is a well understood target, compared with somebody’s website.
  • In order to achieve our target of clean XHTML, we needed to do some editing; the XHTML produced by InDesign’s “Digital Editions” export was presentation-oriented. For instance, bulleted list items were tagged as paragraphs, with a class attribute identifying them as list items. Using the search-and-replace function, we converted such structures to proper XHTML list and list-item elements. Our guiding principle was to make the XHTML as straightforward as possible, not dependent on any particular software to interpret it.
  • We broke the book’s content into individual chapter files; each chapter could then carry its own basic metadata, and the pages conveniently fit our Web content management system (which is actually just a wiki). We assembled a dynamically generated table of contents for the 12 chapters, and created a cover page. Essentially, the book was entirely Web-based at this point.
  • When the book chapters are viewed online, they are formatted via a CSS2 stylesheet that defines a main column for content as well as dedicating screen real estate for navigational elements. We then created a second template to render the content for exporting; this was essentially a bare-bones version of the book with no navigation and minimal styling. Pages (or even the entire book) can be exported (via the “Save As...” function in a Web browser) for use in either print production or ebook conversion. At this point, we required no skills beyond those of any decent Web designer.
  • Integrating with CS4 for Print Adobe’s IDML language defines elements specific to InDesign; there is nothing in the language that looks remotely like XHTML. So a mechanical transformation step is needed to convert the XHTML content into something InDesign can use. This is not as hard as it might seem.
  • Both XHTML and IDML are composed of straightforward, well-documented structures, and so transformation from one to the other is, as they say, “trivial.” We chose to use XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transforms) to do the work. XSLT is part of the overall XML specification, and thus is very well supported in a wide variety of tools. Our prototype used a scripting engine called xsltproc, a nearly ubiquitous piece of software that we found already installed as part of Mac OS X (contemporary Linux distributions also have this as a standard tool), though any XSLT processor would work.
  • In other words, we don’t need to buy InCopy, because we just replaced it with the Web. Our wiki is now plugged directly into our InDesign layout. It even automatically updates the InDesign document when the content changes. Credit is due at this point to Adobe: this integration is possible because of the open file format in the Creative Suite 4.
  • We wrote an XSLT transformation script[18] that converted the XHTML content from the Web into an InCopy ICML file. The script itself is less than 500 lines long, and was written and debugged over a period of about a week by amateurs (again, the people named at the start of this article). The script runs in a couple of seconds, and the resulting .icml file can then be “placed” directly into an InDesign template. The ICML file references an InDesign stylesheet, so the template file can be set up with a house-styled layout, master pages, and stylesheet definitions for paragraphs and character ranges.
  • The result is very simple and easy to use. Our demonstration requires that a production editor run the XSLT transformation script manually, but there is no reason why this couldn’t be built directly into the Web content management system so that exporting the content to print ran the transformation automatically. The resulting file would then be “placed” in InDesign and proofed.
  • It should be noted that the Book Publishing 1 proof-of-concept was artificially complex; we began with a book laid out in InDesign and ended up with a look-alike book laid out in InDesign. But next time—for instance, when we publish Book Publishing 2—we can begin the process with the content on the Web, and keep it there throughout the editorial process. The book’s content could potentially be written and edited entirely online, as Web content, and then automatically poured into an InDesign template at proof time. “Just in time,” as they say. This represents an entirely new way of thinking of book production. With a Web-first orientation, it makes little sense to think of the book as “in print” or “out of print”—the book is simply available, in the first place online; in the second place in derivative digital formats; and third, but really not much more difficult, in print-ready format, via the usual InDesign CS print production system publishers are already familiar with.
  • Creating Ebook Files Creating electronic versions from XHTML source is vastly simpler than trying to generate these out of the existing print process. The ePub version is extremely easy to generate; so is online marketing copy or excerpts for the Web, since the content begins life Web-native.
  • Since an ePub file is essentially XHTML content in a special wrapper, all that is required is that we properly “wrap” our XHTML content. Ideally, the content in an ePub file is broken into chapters (as ours was) and a table of contents file is generated in order to allow easy navigation within an ebook reader. We used Julian Smart’s free tool eCub[19] to simply and automatically generate the ePub wrapper and the table of contents. The only custom development we did was to create a CSS stylesheet for the ebook so that headings and paragraph indents looked the way we wanted. Starting with XHTML content, creating ePub is almost too easy.
  • today, we are able to put the process together using nothing but standard, relatively ubiquitous Web tools: the Web itself as an editing and content management environment, standard Web scripting tools for the conversion process, and the well-documented IDML file format to integrate the layout tool.
  • Our project demonstrates that Web technologies are indeed good enough to use in an XML-oriented workflow; more specialized and expensive options are not necessarily required. For massive-scale enterprise publishing, this approach may not offer enough flexibility, and the challenge of adding and extracting extra semantic richness may prove more trouble than it's worth.
  • But for smaller firms who are looking at the straightforward benefits of XML-based processes—single source publishing, online content and workflow management, open and accessible archive formats, greater online discoverability—here is a way forward.
  • Rather than a public-facing website, our system relies on the Web as a content management platform—of course a public face could easily be added.
  • The final piece of our puzzle, the ability to integrate print production, was made possible by Adobe's release of InDesign with an open XML file format. Since the Web's XHTML is also XML, is can be easily and confidently transformed to the InDesign format.
  • Furthermore, just to get technical for a moment, XHTML is extensible in a fairly straightforward way, through the common “class” attribute on each element. Web developers have long leveraged this kind of extensibility in the elaboration of “microformats” for semantic-web applications.[10] There is no reason why publishers shouldn’t think to use XHTML’s simple extensibility in a similar way for their own ends.
  • Using the Web as a Production Platform
  • Gary Edwards on 07 Nov 13
     
    I was looking for an answer to a problem Marbux had presented, and found this interesting article.  The issue was that of the upcoming conversion of the Note Case Pro (NCP) layout engine to the WebKit layout engine, and what to do about the NCP document format. My initial reaction was to encode the legacy NCP document format in XML, and run an XSLT to a universal pivot format like TEI-XML.  From there, the TEI-XML community would provide all the XSLT transformation routines for conversion to ODF, OOXML, XHTML, ePUB and HTML/CSS. Researching the problems one might encounter with this approach, I found this article.  Fascinating stuff. My take away is that TEI-XML would not be as effective a "universal pivot point" as XHTML.  Or perhaps, if NCP really wants to get aggressive; IDML - InDesign Markup Language. The important point though is that XHTML is a browser specific version of XML, and compatible with the Web Kit layout engine Miro wants to move NCP to. The concept of encoding an existing application-specific format in XML has been around since 1998, when XML was first introduced as a W3C standard, a "structured" subset of SGML. (HTML is also a subset of SGML). The multiplatform StarOffice productivity suite became "OpenOffice" when Sun purchased the company in 1998, and open sourced the code base. The OpenOffice developer team came out with a XML encoding of their existing document formats in 2000. The application specific encoding became an OASIS document format standard proposal in 2002 - also known as ODF. Microsoft followed OpenOffice with a XML encoding of their application-specific binary document formats, known as OOXML. Encoding the existing NCP format in XML, specifically targeting XHTML as a "universal pivot point", would put the NCP Outliner in the Web editor category, without breaking backwards compatibility. The trick is in the XSLT conversion process. But I think that is something much easier to handle then trying to
  • Gary Edwards on 07 Nov 13
     
    I was looking for an answer to a problem Marbux had presented, and found this interesting article.  The issue was that of the upcoming conversion of the Note Case Pro (NCP) layout engine to the WebKit layout engine, and what to do about the NCP document format. My initial reaction was to encode the legacy NCP document format in XML, and run an XSLT to a universal pivot format like TEI-XML.  From there, the TEI-XML community would provide all the XSLT transformation routines for conversion to ODF, OOXML, XHTML, ePUB and HTML/CSS. Researching the problems one might encounter with this approach, I found this article.  Fascinating stuff. My take away is that TEI-XML would not be as effective a "universal pivot point" as XHTML.  Or perhaps, if NCP really wants to get aggressive; IDML - InDesign Markup Language. As an after thought, i was thinking that an alternative title to this article might have been, "Working with Web as the Center of Everything".
  • Gary Edwards on 15 Nov 13
     
    I was looking for an answer to a problem Marbux had presented, and found this interesting article.  The issue was that of the upcoming conversion of the Note Case Pro (NCP) layout engine to the WebKit layout engine, and what to do about the NCP document format. My initial reaction was to encode the legacy NCP document format in XML, and run an XSLT to a universal pivot format like TEI-XML.  From there, the TEI-XML community would provide all the XSLT transformation routines for conversion to ODF, OOXML, XHTML, ePUB and HTML/CSS. Researching the problems one might encounter with this approach, I found this article.  Fascinating stuff. My take away is that TEI-XML would not be as effective a "universal pivot point" as XHTML.  Or perhaps, if NCP really wants to get aggressive; IDML - InDesign Markup Language. The important point though is that XHTML is a browser specific version of XML, and compatible with the Web Kit layout engine Miro wants to move NCP to. The concept of encoding an existing application-specific format in XML has been around since 1998, when XML was first introduced as a W3C standard, a "structured" subset of SGML. (HTML is also a subset of SGML). The multiplatform StarOffice productivity suite became "OpenOffice" when Sun purchased the company in 1998, and open sourced the code base. The OpenOffice developer team came out with a XML encoding of their existing document formats in 2000. The application specific encoding became an OASIS document format standard proposal in 2002 - also known as ODF. Microsoft followed OpenOffice with a XML encoding of their application-specific binary document formats, known as OOXML. Encoding the existing NCP format in XML, specifically targeting XHTML as a "universal pivot point", would put the NCP Outliner in the Web editor category, without breaking backwards compatibility. The trick is in the XSLT conversion process. But I think that is something much easier to handle then trying to
Gary Edwards

Antitrust & Competition : The European Union, the United States, and Microsoft: A Comparative Review of Antitrust Doctrine - 0 views

lawprofessors.typepad.com/...iew-of-antitrust-doctrine.html

antitrust interoperability

shared by Gary Edwards on 01 Sep 09 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 01 Sep 09
     
    Interoperability through antitrust - is there a legal foundation in place capable of pulling this off?  This article is a lengthy study and comparative analysis of the legal foundation in the USA and Europe.  Microsoft is of course the target. Excerpt: Microsoft has incorporated products, such as browsers and media players, into its operating system, behavior that again amounts to technological tying. It has also improved its server software by heightening the degree to which servers employing that software can interact. By raising the level of interaction among servers equipped with its software, Microsoft has so integrated work group servers as to enable groups of small servers to approach the capacities of mainframe computers. The European competition-law authorities see both matters as problematic. The integration of the media player has been condemned as tying; and the heightened server interaction has been faulted for failing to provide the interoperability that rival server software requires in order to participate on an equal footing with Microsoft server software in Windows work groups. Microsoft’s integration (at least in the view of the European antitrust authorities) also raises issues of essential facilities, and of the role of antitrust in achieving interoperability. . We have now reached a moment in time in which both the American and European laws are sufficiently developed to warrant reflection and comparison. That is the task approached in this article.  Three part study:  Part I -The European approach.  Part II-USA decisions regarding Microsoft tying.  Part III-comparison of USA and European approaches to product integration (tying).
Gary Edwards

Online brochure maker by pub HTML5 is available online for everyone - WhaTech - 0 views

www.whatech.com/...-available-online-for-everyone

HTML5 HTML5-CSS3-JavaScript

shared by Gary Edwards on 28 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 28 Dec 15
     
    "The press release introduces detailed capabilities of PUB HTML5's online brochure maker. The software is developed for people to prepare brochures online easily. PUB HTML5 is a leading publishing destination suitable for business owners, non-profit organizations as well as individuals. Whether you have a small scale business or a huge multinational company, you can certainly depend on PUB HTML5 for digital publishing. It is an open access HTML5 Digital Publishing Platform that allows you to convert PDF, MS Office and Open Office documents to HTML5 and jQuery based publications at no cost at all. These features make your flipbook even more attractive for the customers. Anna Lee, the chief designer of PUB HTML5 has announced a new online brochure maker (http://pubhtml5.com/digital-brochures-maker). It would make brochure designing simpler for the users. With the help of this software, you will be able to customize your catalogs, brochures and magazines online. More than six lakh users rely on PUB HTML5 for online publishing. The content published using the software program is compatible with all leading computers, laptops, tablets and mobile interfaces. Operating Systems like Android, iOS and Windows 8 also support this software quite well."
Gary Edwards

Microsoft Hit By U.S. DOT Ban On Windows Vista, Explorer 7, and Office 2007 - Technology News by InformationWeek - 0 views

www.informationweek.com/...showArticle.jhtml

exchange/sharepoint government msoffice odf opendocument standards vista vistachain vistastack

shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07 - Cached
  • »  E-Mail »  Print »  Discuss »  Write To Editor late last year -- can be resolved. "We have more confidence in Microsoft than we would have 10 years ago," says Schmidt. "But it always makes sense to look at the security implications, the value back to the customer, and those kind of issues." The DOT's ban on Vista, Internet Explorer 7, and Office 2007 applies to 15,000 computer users at DOT proper who are currently running the Windows XP Professional operating system. The memo indicates that a similar ban is in effect at the Federal Aviation Administration, which has 45,000 desktop users. Compatibility with existing applications appears to be the Transportation Department's major concern. According to a separate memo, a number of key software applications and utilities in use in various branches of the department aren't Vista compatible. Among them are Aspen 2.8.1, ISS 2.11, ProVu 3.1.1, and Capri 6.5, according to a memo issued by staffers at the DOT's Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. Any prolonged ban on new Microsoft technologies by the federal government could have a significant impact on the software maker's bottom line, as Microsoft sells millions of dollars in software to the feds annually. http://as.cmpnet.com/event.ng/Type=count&ClientType=2&AdID=125682&FlightID=75634&TargetID=2625&SiteID=222&AffiliateID=283&EntityDefResetFlag=0&Segments=1411,3108,3448,11291,12119&Targets=2625,2878,7904,8579&Values=34,46,51,63,77,87,91,102,140,222,227,283,442,646,656,1184,1255,1311,1405,1431,1716,1767,1785,1798,1925,1945,1970,2217,2299,2310,2326,2352,2678,2727,2767,2862,2942,3140,3347,3632,3636,3638,3890,3904,4080,448
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07
       
      DOT chief technology officer Tim Schmidt DOT's CIO Daniel Mintz Federal Department of Transportation
  • Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07
     
    Whoa, those government desktops add up quickly.  This Vista ban will immediately effect over 50,000 desktops, with tens of thousands more possibly impacted by the IE 7.0 ban.  The MS Exchange/SharePoint Hub juggernaut is based on IE 7.0, which is not available for Windows 2000 - MSOffice 2000 desktops.

    Lack of Vista Stack compatibility with non Microsoft application is given as the reason for the ban.  But notice the "alternatives" to Vista mentioned; Novel SuSE and Apple Mac.  What kind of interop - compatibility do they offer?  My guess is ZERO!

    The reality is that the DOT is trapped.  My advice would be stay exactly where they are, keeping the current MSOffice desktop installs running.  Then, install the Foundation's daVinci ODF plugin for MSOffice. 

    This will insure that Windows OS and  MSOffice bound business processes can continue to function without disruption.  Win32 APi based applications like those mentioned in the article can continue.  Critical day to day business processes, workgroup and workflow related activities can continue without disruption or costly re engineering demanded by a cross platform port.

    What daVinci doe sdo is move the iron triangle that binds Windows-MSOffice applications to business processes and documents, to an ODF footing.  Once on a ODF footing, the government can push forward with the same kind of workgroup - workflow - intelligent docuemnt - collaborative computing advnaces that the Vista Stack was designed to deliver.  Only this push will involve the highly competitive "the customer is sovereign" environment of ODF ready desktop, server, device and Web 2.0 systems.  End of Redmond lock-in.  End of the costly iron triangle and the force march upgrade treadmill that so enriches Microsoft.

    So what's not to like?  We can do this.
    ~ge~

    http://docs.google.com/View?docID=dghfk5w9_20d2x6rf&revi
cecilia marie

Software Support Saved My Spring Days - 1 views

Last spring, I was having trouble with a recurrent problem from a software I installed on my PC. It keeps on displaying errors on the screen which really got me ticked off. After 2 weeks of putting...

software support

started by cecilia marie on 10 Aug 11 no follow-up yet
Gary Edwards

Readium at the London Book Fair 2014: Open Source for an Open Publishing Ecosystem: Readium.org Turns One - 0 views

www.publishersweekly.com/...tem-readium-org-turns-one.html

Readium ePUB OpenWeb-Productivity-Platform HTML5

shared by Gary Edwards on 05 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 05 Apr 14
     
    excerpt/intro: Last month marked the one-year anniversary of the formation of the Readium Foundation (Readium.org), an independent nonprofit launched in March 2013 with the objective of developing commercial-grade open source publishing technology software. The overall goal of Readium.org is to accelerate adoption of ePub 3, HTML5, and the Open Web Platform by the digital publishing industry to help realize the full potential of open-standards-based interoperability. More specifically, the aim is to raise the bar for ePub 3 support across the industry so that ePub maintains its position as the standard distribution format for e-books and expands its reach to include other types of digital publications. In its first year, the Readium consortium added 15 organizations to its membership, including Adobe, Google, IBM, Ingram, KERIS (S. Korea Education Ministry), and the New York Public Library. The membership now boasts publishers, retailers, distributors and technology companies from around the world, including organizations based in France, Germany, Norway, U.S., Canada, China, Korea, and Japan. In addition, in February 2014 the first Readium.org board was elected by the membership and the first three projects being developed by members and other contributors are all nearing "1.0" status. The first project, Readium SDK, is a rendering "engine" enabling native apps to support ePub 3. Readium SDK is available on four platforms-Android, iOS, OS/X, and Windows- and the first product incorporating Readium SDK (by ACCESS Japan) was announced last October. Readium SDK is designed to be DRM-agnostic, and vendors Adobe and Sony have publicized plans to integrate their respective DRM solutions with Readium SDK. A second effort, Readium JS, is a pure JavaScript ePub 3 implementation, with configurations now available for cloud based deployment of ePub files, as well as Readium for Chrome, the successor to the original Readium Chrome extension developed by IDPF as the
  • Gary Edwards on 05 Apr 14
     
    excerpt/intro: Last month marked the one-year anniversary of the formation of the Readium Foundation (Readium.org), an independent nonprofit launched in March 2013 with the objective of developing commercial-grade open source publishing technology software. The overall goal of Readium.org is to accelerate adoption of ePub 3, HTML5, and the Open Web Platform by the digital publishing industry to help realize the full potential of open-standards-based interoperability. More specifically, the aim is to raise the bar for ePub 3 support across the industry so that ePub maintains its position as the standard distribution format for e-books and expands its reach to include other types of digital publications. In its first year, the Readium consortium added 15 organizations to its membership, including Adobe, Google, IBM, Ingram, KERIS (S. Korea Education Ministry), and the New York Public Library. The membership now boasts publishers, retailers, distributors and technology companies from around the world, including organizations based in France, Germany, Norway, U.S., Canada, China, Korea, and Japan. In addition, in February 2014 the first Readium.org board was elected by the membership and the first three projects being developed by members and other contributors are all nearing "1.0" status. The first project, Readium SDK, is a rendering "engine" enabling native apps to support ePub 3. Readium SDK is available on four platforms-Android, iOS, OS/X, and Windows- and the first product incorporating Readium SDK (by ACCESS Japan) was announced last October. Readium SDK is designed to be DRM-agnostic, and vendors Adobe and Sony have publicized plans to integrate their respective DRM solutions with Readium SDK. A second effort, Readium JS, is a pure JavaScript ePub 3 implementation, with configurations now available for cloud based deployment of ePub files, as well as Readium for Chrome, the successor to the original Readium Chrome extension developed by IDPF as the
Gary Edwards

Google should switch to ODF to gain market in Europe | The Mukt - 2 views

www.themukt.com/...-switch-odf-gain-market-europe

ODF OOXML Microsoft

shared by Gary Edwards on 25 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 25 Jul 14
     
    "Microsoft is definitely not happy with the UK government's decision to use ODF for government documents. The UK has made the right decision as Microsoft's file formats create a vendor lock where only Microsoft can offer software, cutting out every single player on planet earth. Microsoft works really hard to make its documents almost incompatible with every word processor out there. If you have created document in MS file formats, using Microsoft software, you have created document which will lose data if opened with non-Microsoft software. You may blame LibreOffice, openOffice, Calligra or Google Docs for 'losing some data', but the blame goes to Microsoft. So the best solution is to move away from Microsoft file-formats, so that you can break this vicious cycle. But how many people use ODF? Not many that I know of. The reason is simple, Microsoft pushes its own X formats which it claims to implement the OOXML specification. That's not surprising. What's surprising is that Google also pushes X formats and has one of the most pathetic supports for ISO approved open standards ODF."
Gary Edwards

LibreOffice 4.3 boosts document compatibility | InfoWorld - 0 views

www.infoworld.com/...ts-document-compatibility.html

OOXML OpenXML Office-Interop Office-Compatibility Office 365 LibreOffice

shared by Gary Edwards on 18 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 18 Mar 16
     
    "Version 4.3 of LibreOffice, the free and open source productivity suite developed by the Document Foundation and derived from the OpenOffice.org project, was released today. Aside from the usual array of bug fixes and new features designed to make it more cross-compatible with Microsoft Office, version 4.3 has features that give files from legacy Macintosh productivity software a new lease on life. Take control! 30 essential OS X command-line tips Go beyond the graphical user interface and take full advantage of Mac OS X at the command line READ NOW Most of the improvements around file handling in 4.3 involve better support for various aspects of the Office Open XML (OOXML) format used by Microsoft for its productivity software. LibreOffice users have often complained of opening Word 2010 or Word 2013 documents and finding that the formatting had been mangled or features like annotations hadn't survive being resaved in LibreOffice. Version 4.3 preserves many more of the attributes used in OOXML documents, such as style attributes for text and images. Also new to this edition of LibreOffice is import support for document formats created by a slew of legacy Macintosh applications: BeagleWorks, ClarisWorks, Claris Resolve, GreatWorks, MacWorks, SuperPaint, and Wingz. Likewise, Microsoft Works spreadsheets and databases -- not just word processing documents -- can now also be imported into LibreOffice. Another change, which might not directly affect many users but hints at how the refactoring of LibreOffice's code is reaching many legacy issues, involves the lengths of paragraphs. Previously, paragraphs in a LibreOffice document couldn't exceed 65,000 characters due to a bug in the underlying OpenOffice.org code that had persisted for over a decade and remained unclosed. Other changes include comments that can now be "printed in the document margin, formatted in a better way, and imported and exported," according to the Document Foundation; better behaviors for sp
Paul Merrell

EUROPA - Press Releases - Antitrust: Commission opens proceedings against MathWorks - 1 views

europa.eu/...pressReleasesAction.do

interop DG Competition antitrust European Commission

shared by Paul Merrell on 04 Mar 12 - No Cached
Marc Lijour liked it
  • Brussels, 1 March 2012 - The European Commission has opened a formal investigation to assess whether The MathWorks Inc., a U.S.-based software company, has distorted competition in the market for the design of commercial control systems by preventing competitors from achieving interoperability with its products. The Commission will investigate whether by allegedly refusing to provide a competitor with end-user licences and interoperability information, the company has breached EU antitrust rules that prohibit the abuse of a dominant position. The opening of proceedings means that the Commission will examine the case as a matter of priority. It does not prejudge the outcome of the investigation. The investigation follows a complaint alleging that MathWorks had refused to provide a competitor with end-user software licences and accompanying interoperability information for its flagship products "Simulink" and "MATLAB", thereby preventing it from lawfully reverse-engineering in order to achieve interoperability with these two products.
  • As in the Microsoft case (see IP/04/382 and MEMO/04/70 and MEMO/07/359), the issue of software interoperability is central to this investigation. The Commission's investigation will focus on whether MathWorks' behaviour has prevented competitors from achieving interoperability with its widely used products and thereby hindered competition in breach of Article 102 TFEU. In this context, it is recalled that the European Directive 2009/24/EC on the legal protection of computer programmes also aims to foster interoperability by allowing for reverse-engineering for interoperability purposes provided that the software at issue was lawfully acquired.
  • Background MathWorks' "Simulink" and "MATLAB" software products are widely used for designing and simulating control systems. Control systems are deployed in many innovative industries such as in cruise control or anti-lock braking systems (ABS) for cars. Article 102 TFEU prohibits the abuse of a dominant position which may affect trade and prevent or restrict competition. The implementation of this provision is defined in the Antitrust Regulation (Council Regulation No 1/2003) which can be applied by the Commission and by the national competition authorities of EU Member States. The Commission has informed MathWorks and the Member States' competition authorities that it has formally opened proceedings in this case.
  • Paul Merrell on 04 Mar 12
     
    Commission v. MIcrosoft Redux.
Gary Edwards

Microsoft attacks UK government decision to adopt ODF for document formats - 0 views

www.computerweekly.com/...adopt-ODF-for-document-formats

ODF Microsoft

shared by Gary Edwards on 23 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • the panel reached consensus that one standard is important to ensure interoperability and to allow users to collaborate effectively on the same document,” said the minutes
  • A subsequent meeting of the same panel also considered a detailed comparison of ODF and OOXML, citing concerns raised by one member. “We need to make sure there is sound reasoning to back up the decision as this may incur significant costs to some government departments. The comparison may be slightly skewed by concentrating solely on implementation of strict OOXML, which is an emerging standard similar to ODF 1.3, whilst considering implementations of all ODF versions. It ignores transitional OOXML which does have very wide support, arguably wider than ODF,” said the meeting minutes.
  • “LH described the issues identified in the [comparison] document and added that there has since been some confusion about support for OOXML strict in LibreOffice.  It appears that LibreOffice supports the standardised transitional OOXML, as well as a different Microsoft version of transitional OOXML,” the minutes stated.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Despite its obvious disappointment at the government’s decision, Microsoft was also keen to point out that its software does fully support ODF.
  • “The good news for Office users is that Office 365 and Office 2013 both have excellent support for the ODF file format, so their current and future investments in Office are safe.  In fact, Office 365 remains the only business productivity suite on the UK government’s G-Cloud that is accredited to the government’s own security classification of 'Official' and which also supports ODF,” said the Microsoft spokesman.
  • Government Digital Service director Mike Bracken
  • Gary Edwards on 23 Jul 14
     
    "Microsoft has attacked the UK government's decision to adopt ODF as its standard document format, saying it is "unclear" how UK citizens will benefit. The Cabinet Office announced its new policy yesterday, whereby Open Document Format (ODF) is immediately established as the standard for sharing documents across the public sector, with PDF and HTML also acceptable when viewing documents. SERGIGN - FOTOLIA The decision was a rejection of Microsoft's preference for Open XML (OOXML), the standard used by its Word software, which remains the dominant wordprocessor in government. "Microsoft notes the government's decision to restrict its support of the file formats it uses for sharing and collaboration to just ODF and HTML," said a spokesman for the software giant in a statement to Computer Weekly. "Microsoft believes it is unproven and unclear how UK citizens will benefit from the government's decision. We actively support a broad range of open standards, which is why, like Adobe has with the PDF file format, we now collaborate with many contributors to maintain the Open XML file format through independent and international standards bodies," it added"
Gary Edwards

ODF vs. OOXML: War of the Words | Andrew Updegrove: Tales of Adversego - 0 views

updegrove.wordpress.com/...odf-vs-ooxml-war-of-the-words

ODF

shared by Gary Edwards on 16 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 16 Mar 14
     
    "For some time I've been considering writing a book about what has become a standards war of truly epic proportions.  I refer, of course, to the ongoing, ever expanding, still escalating conflict between ODF and OOXML, a battle that is playing out across five continents and in both the halls of government and the marketplace alike.  And, needless to say, at countless blogs and news sites all the Web over as well. Arrayed on one side or the other, either in the forefront of battle or behind the scenes, are most of the major IT vendors of our time.  And at the center of the conflict is Microsoft, the most successful software vendor of all time, faced with the first significant challenge ever to one of its core businesses and profit centers - its flagship Office productivity suite. The story has other notable features as well:  ODF is the first IT standard to be taken up as a popular cause, and also represents the first "cross over" standards issue that has attracted the broad support of the open source community.  Then there are the societal dimensions: open formats are needed to safeguard our culture and our history from oblivion.  And when implemented in open source software and deployed on Linux-based systems (not to mention One Laptop Per Child computers), the benefits and opportunities of IT become more available to those throughout the third world. There is little question, I think, that regardless of where and how this saga ends, it will be studied in business schools and by economists for decades to come.  What they will conclude will depend in part upon the materials we leave behind for them to examine.  That's one of the reasons I'm launching this effort now, as a publicly posted eBook in progress, rather than waiting until some indefinite point in the future when the memories of the players in this drama have become colored by the passage of time and the influence of later events. My hope is that those of you who have played or are n
Gary Edwards

Govt on ODF: Looks good, is bad « the spike - 0 views

ivo.co.za/...government-odf-standard

odf

shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07 - Cached
  • This strikes me as a very badly misguided definition. Not even Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, believes Software must be “free” as in “free beer” (though if it is, all the better, of course). Yet the government’s specification is full of references to “non-commercial”, “free of cost” and “without any royalties”. It is, of course, perfectly within its rights to specify a functional requirement for an open standard. But demanding that it is free, that it is maintained by a non-commercial organisation, that all intellectual property is given away for free, is going way beyond any reasonable, functional definition of “open standard”. It excludes any supplier that provides Software conforming to perfectly open, accessible, and functionally satisfactory standards, but does so for a fee. It might even end up excluding all those open source developers who spent their twenties toiling away for free in the vain hope that one day, they’d get to pay for their sports cars and luxury homes from support revenue.
  • Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07
     
    Interesting observation about South Africa and their "free as in beer" software requirements.  This governement attitude towards open source is far more wide spread than commonly thought.  One would have hoped that interoperability and open standards were also part of the FOSS equation, but it looks like zero cost is the primary driver.
Gary Edwards

ODF calls time on da Vinci coding | The Register Lucy Sherriff - 0 views

www.theregister.co.uk/...odf_davinci_code

cdf odf ooxml w3c

shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07 - Cached
  • 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."
Gary Edwards

Why is Microsoft Office so hard to kill? | Applications - InfoWorld - 0 views

www.infoworld.com/...rosoft-office-so-hard-kill-264

ODF OpenOffice MSOffice compatibility interoperability softmaker-Office

shared by Gary Edwards on 30 Jun 09 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 30 Jun 09
     
    This article compliments the previous publication, "The better Office Alternative - Softmaker Office". Good stuff! Excerpt: "It's the question that vexes free open source software advocates and commercial competitors around the globe: Why is Microsoft Office so difficult to dislodge from its perch atop the IT heap? Is it the exclusive bundling deals? The deep software Assurance entrenchment? Steve Ballmer's backroom deal with the devil?" "The answer, of course, is none of the above (though some evidence of a Microsoft-Hell alliance exists). Rather, it's the Office ecosystem -- the vast library of third-party add-ons and vertical solutions built (with copious encouragement from Microsoft) on Office's extensive programmatic model -- that makes Microsoft's suite so hard to kill."
Gary Edwards

WebODF - 1 views

webodf.org

WebODF WebKit HTML+

shared by Gary Edwards on 01 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 01 Jun 11
     
    WebODF is a JavaScript library that makes it easy to add Open Document Format (ODF) support to your website and to your mobile or desktop application. It uses HTML and CSS to display ODF documents. WebODF is a Free Software project. All code is available under the AGPL. This means that you can use the code free of charge, investigate how it works, and share it with others. Description of WebODF From LWN: ODF on the web An especially interesting project that was presented is WebODF, which wants to bring ODF to the web. Jos van den Oever started from the observation that a lot of office suites are moving into the "cloud". Examples are Microsoft Live Office, Google Docs, and Zoho. But where are the free Software alternatives for the cloud? For OpenOffice.org, KOffice, AbiWord, and Gnumeric, there are none that have a cloud version with ODF support. That was the motivation for Jos to start a project to fill in this gap and let users view and edit ODF documents on the web without losing control of the document into some company's servers. The strategy Jos followed was to use just HTML and JavaScript for the web application. The application then loads the XML stream of the ODF document as is into the HTML document and puts it into the DOM tree. Styling is done by applying CSS rules that are directly derived from the and elements in the ODF document. That is how WebODF was born; it is a project with the initial goal of creating a simple ODF viewer and editor for offline and online use, implemented in HTML5. The small code base consists of one HTML5 file and eight JavaScript files, each of which is a few hundred lines of code. The most interesting part is that it doesn't need server-side code execution: the JavaScript code is executed in the user's browser and saving the document to the web server is done using WebDAV. It supports both the Gecko and WebKit HTML engines. There is also an implementation on top of QtWebKit, which is
Graham Perrin

FR: Advocacy group protests government's approving of OOXML - - 0 views

www.osor.eu/...governments-approving-of-ooxml

2009 2009-11 2009-11-21 Office Open XML

shared by Graham Perrin on 21 Nov 09 - Cached
  • FR: Advocacy group protests government's approving of OOXML
  • Nov 20, 2009
  • Gijs Hillenius
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • April, a French free and open source software advocacy group, is protesting the French government's approval of Microsoft's OOXML as a government document standard, alongside the open document format ODF.
  • General interoperability framework for public administrations and local governments, RGI
  • Référentiel Général d'Interopératibilité
  • We have just missed a historical opportunity to support openness and innovation in the software market
  • calling on members of the French parliament to clarify the RGI
  • The RGI does not resolve the controversy between software publishers and supporters of free software. Both standards office are placed 'under observation', and their use remains at the discretion of each administrative authority.
  • Graham Perrin on 21 Nov 09
Gary Edwards

Google Makes it Easier to Dump Microsoft Office #io14 - 0 views

www.cmswire.com/...crosoft-office-io14-025692.php

wordsdk offic-365 Cloud-Productivity-Platform

shared by Gary Edwards on 20 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 20 Aug 14
     
    "At I/O, Google always seems to find a way to squeeze the fun from Microsoft's master plan to rule the business world. This year, the 'something' comes in the ability to edit Microsoft Office documents in Google Docs. At face value, it doesn't seem too serious. But when you stand back and look at it, it takes on far more significance than first impressions convey. Who Needs Office? Equally important is the fact that Google Docs enable users to open Word, Excel and PowerPoint files, make changes and then save them onto the Google cloud in their native formats. By enabling users to edit Office documents through the cloud-based platform, it removes one of the biggest obstacles to Google Docs adoption. It also puts Google right up there with Microsoft Office as an option for enterprises looking for a business productivity suite. OK, we know. Microsoft Office has a lot more punch than Google Docs or even Google Apps, offering all kinds of functionality that Google still hasn't introduced. But Google Apps is still cheaper than Office 365 - and in light of this week's Outlook.com outage, it is probably looking a lot more attractive, especially to those who couldn't access their emails. It is also worth remembering that, as we saw in April, a lot of business users are using only limited functions in Office and could quite happily dump it, take up Google Docs and still work away without any problems. In fact, the research by SoftWatch showed the average employee spends only 48 minutes per day in MS Office programs, and most of that time is spent on Outlook. Other Office application use usually occurs for viewing and light editing purposes, with only a tiny portion of the workforce identified as heavy users. The new editing functionality Google is offering is also available for mobile devices along with offline support that means that users can work away on their documents even when they are out of mobile reach and have the changes uploaded once they
Gary Edwards

Google is stealing away Microsoft's future corporate customers - Quartz - 0 views

qz.com/...fts-future-corporate-customers

wordsdk Office-365 Cloud-Productivity-Platform

shared by Gary Edwards on 20 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • This says two things. First, Microsoft and other vendors like IBM still have a tight grip on the largest companies.
  • Gartner analyst Tom Eid—who predicts that enterprise email alone will be a $5 billion global industry this year, growing about 10% from last year—confirms this. He estimates that Microsoft still commands 75% of the market’s spending, versus about 3% to 5% for Google.
  • Still, its legacy business of licensing software to corporations—the one under attack—generated $42 billion in highly profitable sales last fiscal year, barely growing.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Microsoft has entered cloud-based email and apps markets, and said in its most recent earnings report that commercial Office 365 subscription sales—which includes email as well as Office apps—grew more than 100% year-over-year.
  • Microsoft has long dominated the corporate-software market, and its new CEO Satya Nadella has set his sights on owning all things related to productivity and the cloud. But Google—fueled by its search-advertising business and consumer popularity—has been coming on strong for years with lower-priced, cloud-based services such as email and calendars, productivity apps, video hangouts, and storage. And among certain types of customers, it is succeeding. + For a snapshot of Google’s progress, Quartz looked up the email-hosting MX records for 150 companies across three general size categories: the “Fortune 50″ largest US companies; a group of mid-size tech and media companies, both public and private; and 50 startups from the last Y Combinator incubator class in Silicon Valley. The results are…exactly what you might expect!
  • Among the Fortune 50, only one company—Google—had its mail records pointed at Google’s servers.
  • But Google is capturing Microsoft’s future customer base.
  • Gary Edwards on 20 Aug 14
     
    "Microsoft has long dominated the corporate-software market, and its new CEO Satya Nadella has set his sights on owning all things related to productivity and the cloud. But Google-fueled by its search-advertising business and consumer popularity-has been coming on strong for years with lower-priced, cloud-based services such as email and calendars, productivity apps, video hangouts, and storage. And among certain types of customers, it is succeeding. + For a snapshot of Google's progress, Quartz looked up the email-hosting MX records for 150 companies across three general size categories: the "Fortune 50″ largest US companies; a group of mid-size tech and media companies, both public and private; and 50 startups from the last Y Combinator incubator class in Silicon Valley. The results are…exactly what you might expect! "
Gary Edwards

ODF - the state of play - The future of ODF under OASIS, now that the... - 1 views

www.it-director.com/...-that-the-standards-war-is-won

ODF msooxml

shared by Gary Edwards on 20 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 20 Nov 15
     
    "ODF - open document format - is an open, XML-based rich document format that has been adopted as the standard for exchanging information in documents (spreadsheets, charts, presentations and word processing documents), by many governments and other organisations (see, for example, here), including the UK Government. This is despite strong opposition by Microsoft; but I have seen Microsoft's proposed "open XML" standard and, frankly, it is huge and horrid (in the word of standards, these go together). If I remember correctly, the early draft I saw even incorporated recognition of early Excel leap-year bugs into the standard. ODF is now a pukka ISO standard, maintained by OASIS, under the proud banner: "The future is interoperability". My personal thoughts, below, are prompted by an ODF session at ApacheCon Core titled "Beyond OpenOffice: The State of the ODF Ecosystem" held by Louis Suárez-Potts (community strategist for Age of Peers, his own consultancy, and the Community Manager for OpenOffice.org, from 2000 to 2011), and attended by very few delegates - perhaps a sign of current level of interest in ODF within the Apache community. Nevertheless, and I am talking about the ODF standard here, not Apache Open Office (which is currently my office software of choice) or its Libre Office fork (which seems to be where the excitement, such as it is, is, for now), the standards battle, or one battle, has been won; we have a useful Open Document Format, standardised by a recognised and mature standards organisation, and even Microsoft Office supports it. That's good. So what could be the problem? Well, I don't care whether I use ODF from Open Office, Libre Office or even Office 365, I just want to be sure that everyone else can read my ODF documents (with a .odt, .ods or .odp extension, for text, presentation or spreadsheet, respectively), with whatever software they like; and that they'll either see exactly the functionality and formatting I see; or a well defined (an
Gary Edwards

ODF Plugfest: Making office tools interoperable [LWN.net] - 0 views

lwn.net/410387

webodf ODF1.2 ODF HTML+ WebKit Gecko QTWebKit

shared by Gary Edwards on 30 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • ODF on the web An especially interesting project that was presented is WebODF, which wants to bring ODF to the web. Jos van den Oever started from the observation that a lot of office suites are moving into the "cloud". Examples are Microsoft Live Office, Google Docs, and Zoho. But where are the free software alternatives for the cloud? For OpenOffice.org, KOffice, AbiWord, and Gnumeric, there are none that have a cloud version with ODF support. That was the motivation for Jos to start a project to fill in this gap and let users view and edit ODF documents on the web without losing control of the document into some company's servers. The strategy Jos followed was to use just HTML and JavaScript for the web application. The application then loads the XML stream of the ODF document as is into the HTML document and puts it into the DOM tree. Styling is done by applying CSS rules that are directly derived from the <office:styles> and <office:automatic-styles> elements in the ODF document. That is how WebODF was born; it is a project with the initial goal of creating a simple ODF viewer and editor for offline and online use, implemented in HTML5. The small code base consists of one HTML5 file and eight JavaScript files, each of which is a few hundred lines of code. The most interesting part is that it doesn't need server-side code execution: the JavaScript code is executed in the user's browser and saving the document to the web server is done using WebDAV. It supports both the Gecko and WebKit HTML engines. There is also an implementation on top of QtWebKit, which is for better desktop integration, and an ODFKit implementation. This means that WebODF is an easy way to add ODF support to almost any application, be it in HTML, Gtk, or QML. KO GmbH has received funding from NLnet to improve the current WebODF prototype and see how far the idea goes. Interested readers can try the online demo.
  • Gary Edwards on 30 Oct 10
     
    WebODF...   An especially interesting project that was presented is WebODF, which wants to bring ODF to the web. Jos van den Oever started from the observation that a lot of office suites are moving into the "cloud". Examples are Microsoft Live Office, Google Docs, and Zoho. But where are the free software alternatives for the cloud? For OpenOffice.org, KOffice, AbiWord, and Gnumeric, there are none that have a cloud version with ODF support. That was the motivation for Jos to start a project to fill in this gap and let users view and edit ODF documents on the web without losing control of the document into some company's servers. The strategy Jos followed was to use just HTML and JavaScript for the web application. The application then loads the XML stream of the ODF document as is into the HTML document and puts it into the DOM tree. Styling is done by applying CSS rules that are directly derived from the and elements in the ODF document. That is how WebODF was born; it is a project with the initial goal of creating a simple ODF viewer and editor for offline and online use, implemented in HTML5. The small code base consists of one HTML5 file and eight JavaScript files, each of which is a few hundred lines of code. The most interesting part is that it doesn't need server-side code execution: the JavaScript code is executed in the user's browser and saving the document to the web server is done using WebDAV. It supports both the Gecko and WebKit HTML engines. There is also an implementation on top of QtWebKit, which is for better desktop integration, and an ODFKit implementation. This means that WebODF is an easy way to add ODF support to almost any application, be it in HTML, Gtk, or QML. KO GmbH has received funding from NLnet to improve the current WebODF prototype and see how far the idea goes. Interested readers can try the online demo.
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