Document Wars

Also includes stats in table form indicating that according to Google Search OOXML documents now outnumber ODF documents on the Web, for word processor documents, spreadsheet documents, and presentation documents.

The more interesting issue to me is whose voice Groklaw echoes. On the document format war, it's seemed since I stopped contributing articles to Groklaw a few years ago that it is the IBM public relations department's voice being echoed. I'll save for another day the topic of whether the echo chamber is self-delusional or deliberately intended to delude readers.

... and who it's aimed at. It's not as if Groklaw carries any weight (is it?)

Groklaw throws a pretty good punch. E.g., it launched ODF vs. Microsoft XML formats as a public issue. The blog is very influential with trade press reporters who are sympathetic to open source software. And Groklaw has done some good reporting, albeit with evident bias. Its chronicles of the SCO vs. IBM and Novell saga is undoubtedly the most thorough out there. But on ODF and OOXML, the coverage has been presented entirely as a black hat/white hat issue, ODF being perfect and designed for interoperability but OOXML as being pure evil. See e.g., http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20080417104016186 (""If you want true interoperability, you need to implement ODF. Seriously. Any limitations to interoperability are entirely on Microsoft's side of the aisle, and the whole world knows it"). Intended or not, Groklaw justly deserves much credit for forestalling public oversight of the ODF TC's utter failure to deal with interoperability issues effectively and credit for keeping the oversight focus solely on OOXML. You'll find no coverage of ODF bugs on Groklaw, only ODF hugs and kisses. I see the blog as having substantially delayed ODF's repair. Groklaw has an enormous readership and particularly among citizen activists who approach ODF as a political cause rather than as a technical specification. But the Groklaw flavor of ODF v. OOXML propaganda remains consistent with that of IBM VP Bob Sutor.

.... "I recently described how Google's Wave, a collaboration tool based on the new HTML 5 standard, demonstrated the potential for Web applications to unglue Microsoft's hold on customers. My post quoted Gary Edwards, the former president of the Open Document Foundation, a first-hand witness to the failed attempt by Massachusetts to dump Microsoft and as experienced a hand at Microsoft-tilting as anyone I know......"

This is amazing stuff. With all the talk about OpenOffice ODF compatibility problems with existing MSOffice productivity environments and documents, this comparison is stunning. I stumbled across this Compatibility Comparison reading this article: ThinkFree Set to Launch The First Complete Android Office Suite. Documents To Go is currently the only provider of Word and Excel documents on Android. The ThinkFree Office comparisons to OpenOffice cover a number of familiar compatibility issues, with layout at the top of the list. ThinkFree Write 3.5 vs OpenOffice Writer 3.0 ".....When using a word processor to create documents, you really shouldn't have to worry about whether your client will be able to see the document as you intended." ".... However, if you use a low-cost solution like OpenOffice, you should be prepared for frustrations and disappointments....."

Thanks to Paul for digging this up. Who would have guessed that years later, these same issues hang like a dark shroud on the future of ODF? Note also that June 1st of 2007 was the cut off date for ODF 1.2 proposals and recommendations. The OpenFormula and Metadata SC's were rushing to make the cutoff. The List Enhancement proposal itself was just one of many enhancements submitted by Florian Reuter in November of 2006, designed to greatly improve ODF compatibility with MSOffice "ODF". By November of 2006, thanks largely to the Massachusetts Pilot Study, there were a number of ODF plug-ins for MSOffice. All were capable of producing perfectly compliant ISO 26300 ODF, but falling far short of public expectations of high fidelity interop with OpenOffice ODF. Sound familiar? Everyone knew that it was only a matter of time before Microsoft was pressed into providing MSOffice ODF support. There was no doubt that they would face the exact same interop challenges as the many independent plug-in efforts. Hence the stepped up efforts by many at the OASIS ODF to "fix" ISO 26300! At the time of the List Enhancement Proposal, we had increasing evidence from the many pilot studies that ODF was impossible to implement in business and workgroup environments where the MSOffice productivity environment was the defining platform. ODF was not designed to be compatible with MSOffice or the binary documents so critical to business processes bound to this environment. OpenXML was designed exactly to be compatible with these environments. Unless ODF fixed it's compatibility/interoperability problems there was no way for the independent plug-ins to provide a reasonable ODF implementation alternative to OpenXML. And even if Microsoft did produce an MSOffice ODF compliant with ISO 26300, these productivity environments would remain entirely locked. The world expected ODF to be compatible, interoperable, Web ready, and fully capable of cracking open the iron grip Mic

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

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.

Rick Jellife weighs in on the OpenOffice ODF- MSOffice OpenXML interop embroglio. His take is to focus on Classes of Fidelity, providing us with a comparative table of fidelity categories. I wonder though if this über document processing approach is anywhere near consistent with the common sense meaning of interoperability to average end-users? IMHO, end-users interpret "interoperability" to mean that compliant applications can exchange documents without loss of information. "..... In my blog last year Is ODF the new RTF or the new .DOC? Can it be both? Do we need either? I raised the question of whether ODF would replace RTF or DOC. I think this issue has come back with a bang with the release of Office 2007 SP2, and I'd like to give another pointer to it for readers who missed it first time around.... "...... OASIS ODF TC has some kind of conformance and testing wing at work, but it is not at all clear that they will deliver anything in this kind of area. Without targetting these classes, ODF's breezy conformance requirements means that ODF conforment software can deliver vastly different kinds of fidelity, yet still accord to the letter of the law (and, indeed, to the spirit of the ODF spec, which allows so many holes) which will cause frustration all-around....." Ouch!

ODF is important. So What Went Wrong? Response to Jeremy Allison: Having participated in a number of government pilot studies, I must say that you are right; government officials do care about ODF. They really want it to work. But they also had expectations that ODF simply wasn't designed for. What they expected ODF to be was an open technology based on highly-structured XML markup that was application, platform, and vendor-independent, backward compatible, universally interoperable, and importantly, Web ready. That is not ODF nor is it OOXML. In fact, the closest thing we have for meeting these expectations is an ajax-webkit style HTML+ (HTML5, CSS4, SVG/Canvas, JS jQuery, etc.). ODF is highly structured, but it is not application-independent. .....