nazis
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OOXML is defective by design: Microsoft's latest aggression on ODF, codenamed "cast lead" - 0 views
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"Nazis", "genocide", "white phosphorous" -- and all about a file format implementation ...
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GullFOSS - 0 views
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I normally don't post my ODF Plugin news and information on GullFOSS, but so many people complain (everywhere, including in OOo mailing lists) about the bad ODF support in Microsoft Office 2007 SP2, that I thought it might be a good idea to post some information about the ODF Plugin here... The Sun ODF Plugin for Microsoft Office, which is based on OpenOffice.org, adds support for ODF to Microsoft Office 2000 and newer versions. So you don't have to use the very latest Microsoft Office 2007 SP2 version (in case you really need Microsoft Office for some reason) , where ODF support is insufficient anyway.
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Like IBM, Sun bad mouths Microsoft ODF support rather than repairing the relevant defects in the ODF specification. This despite no one yet having come forward with an example of non-conformance that withstands scrutiny. So what should have been bug reports filed against the specification is instead wielded as an advertising weapon against competitors. This is simply more "OOo defines what is valid ODF" horse puckey.
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Dr AJG's Commentary » Rob Weir…Going after Microsoft? - 0 views
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It ahs been clear for a along time that the ODF standard primarily tries to codify various implementations and as such does not guarantee interoperability. Why blame Microsoft if their implementation does not further interoperability either? The writers of the ODF standard are to blame.
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Doug Mahugh : Tracked Changes - 0 views
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Much was made during the IS29500 standards process of the difference in the size of the ODF and Open XML specifications. This is a good example of where that difference comes from: in this case, a concept glossed over in three vague sentences of the ODF spec gets 17 pages of documentation in the Open XML spec.
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This is the nub; OOXML may be overweight, but ODF is severely undernourished as a spec.
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Alex, I know from your previous writings that you do not regard OOXML as completely specified. But your post might be so misinterpreted. In my view, neither ODF nor OOXML has yet reached the threshold of eligibility as an international standard, completely specifying "clearly and unambiguously the conformity requirements that are essential to achieve the interoperability." ISO/IEC JTC 1 Directives, Annex I. . OOXML is ahead of ODF in some aspects of specificity, but the eligibility finish line remains beyond the horizon for both.
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Paul, that's right - though so far the faulty things in OOXML turn out to be more round the edges as opposed to ODF's central lapses. Still, it's early days in the examination of OOXML so I'm reserving making any firm call on the comparative merits of the specs until I have read a lot (a lot) more. Is there an area of OOXML you'd say was particularly underbaked? I'm quite interested in the fact that neither of these beasts specify scripting languages ...
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Hi, Alex, Most seriously, there are no profiles and accompanying requirements to enable less featureful apps to round trip documents with more featureful apps, a la W3C Compound Document by Reference Framework. That's an enormous barrier to market entry and interoperability. That defect reacts synergistically with the dearth of semantic conformity requirements, with the incredible number of options including those 500+ identified extension points, and with a compatibility framework for extensions that while a good start leaves implementers far too much discretion in assigning and processing compatibility attributes. There are also major harmonization issues with other standards that get in the way of transformations, where Microsoft originally rolled its own rather than embracing existing open standards. I think it not insignificant that OOXML as a whole is available only under a RAND-Z pledge rather than being available for the entire world. The patent claims need to be identified and worked around or a different rights scheme needs Microsoft management's promulgation. This is a legal interoperability issue as opposed to technical, but an interoperability barrier nonetheless, an "unnecessary obstacle to international trade" in the sense of the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade. And absent a change by Microsoft in its rights regime, the work-arounds are technical. This is not to suggest that ODF lacks problems in regard to the way it implements standards incorporated by reference. The creation of unique OASIS namespaces rather than doing the needed harmonizing work with the relevant W3C WGs is a large ODF tumor in need of removal and reconstructive surgery. I'm not sure what is happening with the W3C consultation in that regard. I worked a good part of the time over several months comparing ODF and Ecma 376, evaluating their comparative suitability as document exchange formats. I gave up when it climbed well past 100 pages in length because the de
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1. Full-featured editors available that are capable of not generating application-specific extensions to the formats? 2. Interoperability of conforming implementations mandatory? 3. Interoperability between different IT systems either demonstrable or demonstrated? 4. Profiles developed and required for interoperability? 5. Methodology specified for interoperability between less and more featureful applications? 6. Specifies conformity requirements essential to achieve interoperability? 7. Interoperability conformity assessment procedures formally established and validated? 8. Document validation procedures validated? 9. Specifies an interoperability framework? 10. Application-specific extensions classified as non-conformant? 11. Preservation of metadata necessary to achieve interoperability mandatory? 12. XML namespaces for incorporated standards properly implemented? (ODF-only failure because Microsoft didn't incorporate any relevant standards.) 13. Optional feature interop breakpoints eliminated? 14. Scripting language fully specified for embedded scripts? 15. Hooks fully specified for use by embedded scripts? 16. Standard is vendor- and application-neutral? 17. Market requirement -- Capable of converging desktop, server, Web, and mobile device editors and viewers? (OOXML better equipped here, but its patent barrier blocks.)
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Didn't notice that my post before last was chopped at the end until after I had posted the list. Then Diigo stopped responding for a few minutes. Anyway, the list is short summation of my research on the comparative suitabilities of ODF 1.1 and Ecma 376 as document exchange formats, winnowed to the defects they have in common except as noted. The research was never completed because in the political climate of the time, the world wasn't ready to act on the defects. The criteria applied were as objective as I could make them; they were derived from competition law, JTC 1 Directives, and market requirements. I think the list is as good today in regard to IS 29500 as it was then to Ecma 376, although I have not taken an equally deep dive into 29500. You might find the list useful, albeit there is more than a bit of redundancy in it.
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Los Angeles Times - latimes.com - 0 views
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The Obama administration put large companies on notice that it would be tougher on mergers and attempts to stifle competition, restoring the type of aggressive antitrust enforcement of the 1990s that led to the landmark government case against Microsoft Corp.
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Among those likely to feel the heat of federal inquiries are technology companies, such as chip maker Intel Corp., Internet giant Google Inc. and longtime tech leader IBM Corp.
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Where is there an end of it? | Notes on Document Conformance and Portability #3 - 0 views
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a calm look at some of the issues
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Microsoft’s implementation decision
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an implementation of ODF which does not interoperate with other available implementations
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on the face of it
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in the interests of the users
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abandoning the “convention”
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these ODF implementations have limited interoperability
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more or less
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unsafe for any mission-critical data
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ODF implementations can actually cut it,
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legacy support as an option
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this interoperability fiasco has been allowed to happen within the context of a standard
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some real problems with basic spreadsheet interoperability among ODF products using undocumented extensions
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behave better
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good news
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work is underway to fix this problem: ODF 1.2
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people may disagree in good faith
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does not, in fact, conform
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Rob’s statement that “SP2's implementation
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is mistaken on this point
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no grounds for complacency about the sufficiency of the ODF specification
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keen to see defects, such as conformance loopholes, fixed in the next published ODF standard
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I urge all other true supporters to read the drafts and give feedback to make ODF better for the benefit of everyone
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Microsoft is the only one of seven main ODF implementations that fail to achieve interoperability in ODF formulas
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Next round of ODF vs OOXML… « CyberTech Rambler - 0 views
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approval of an standard that wasn’t ready
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no one at ISO listened
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The whole OOXML thing is a collection of mistakes
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in the time frame taken to approve it
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by National Body to trust that BRM has influence
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by BRM for not attending to every concerns of national bodies
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for not incorporating BRM resolutions in the published standard
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OOXML is fundamentally intended to document a format for a pre-existing technology and feature set of recent proprietary systems.
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years for IS29500 to have a really good debugged version
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years for ODF to have a good, complete debugged version
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the nature of big standards
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sad about OOXML meeting
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Apple, Oracle and British Library did not even bothered to turn up
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Found myself blocked from commenting on that blog entry for some reason. Here's the comment I tried to post. @ctrambler "Between vendor-heavy or user-heavy, I choose vendor-heavy. It is after all, a office document format designed for office application. Linking with other systems is important, but it is not the ultimate aim." That statement bespeaks lack of familiarity with what an IT standard *IS.* But it is a lack of familiarity shared by all too many who work on IT standards. Standards are about uniformity, not variability. An international standard must by law specify [i] all characteristics [ii] of an identifiable product or group of products [iii] only in mandatory "must" or "must not" terms. WTDS 135 EC - Asbestos, (World Trade Organization Appellate Body; 12 March 2001; HTML version), para. 66-70, http://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/dispu_e/cases_e/ds135_e.htm And IT standards in particular must "clearly and unambiguously specify all conformity requirements that are essential to achieve the interoperability." ISO/IEC JTC 1 Directives, (5th Ed., v. 3.0, 5 April 2007) pg. 145, http://www.jtc1sc34.org/repository/0856rev.pdf Absent such specifications, a standard is a standard in name only. A standard is intended to establish a market in standardized goods, creating economic efficiency and competition. This is perhaps most simply illustrated with weights and measures, where a pound of flour must weigh the same regardless which vendor sells the product. But we can also see it in the interoperability context, e.g., with standardized nuts, bolts, and wrenches. Absent sufficient specificity to enable and require interoperability, ODF and OOXML create technical barriers to trade rather than promoting competition. And the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade unambiguously requires that national standardization bodies "shall ensure that technical regulations [includes international standards] are not prepared, adopted or applied with a v
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(continuation). . And the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade unambiguously requires that national standardization bodies "shall ensure that technical regulations [includes international standards] are not prepared, adopted or applied with a view to or with the effect of creating unnecessary obstacles to international trade." http://www.wto.org/english/docs_e/legal_e/17-tbt_e.htm#articleII So while I agree that linking IT systems may not invariably be the ultimate goal, sufficient specificity in an IT standard to do so is in fact a threshold user and legal requirement. Otherwise, one has vendor lock-in and definition of the standard is controlled by the vendor with the largest market share, not the standard itself. Neither ODF nor OOXML met than threshold for eligibility as international standards and still do not. In both cases, national standardization bodies voted to adopt the standards without paying heed to fundamental legal and user requirements.
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There is no end, but addition: Alex Brown's weblog - SC 34 Meetings, Jeju Island, Korea... - 0 views
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There seems to be a view abroad that to be a friend of ODF one cannot criticise it. This has done enormous damage, I believe, the result of which will become plain over the coming months as implemenations which are strictly conformant will demonstrate non-substitutablity. When this happens the blame will lie at the feet of the specification.
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Prophetic indeed, but it didn't even require a crystal ball to see that one coming down the track. There is something about a technical specification that allows the vendor with the largest market share to define it that invites this kind of thing.
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Doug Mahugh : 1 + 2 = 1? - 0 views
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five prioritized guiding principles for Office’s ODF implementation
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When Will Office Support OpenFormula?
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nobody knows yet when ODF 1.2 will be published as an OASIS or ISO standard
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risk that the results might not be the same
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Open XML / ODF Translator Add-Ins for Office can be used with Office 2007 SP2
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Sun ODF Plugin
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apparently works with SP2
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IBM Wins Pyrrhic Format Battle Over Microsoft | Michael Hickins - 0 views
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Michael Hickins has an interesting angle on the document wars: ...... "By releasing a new service pack for Office that includes support for the open document format (ODF), Microsoft appears to be complying with European demands that it play well with others, while putting to rest accusations by IBM that it is still trying to maintain a monopoly over document formats. But forgive IBM for failing to cheer an apparent victory in its long-running document format war with Microsoft; IBM is busy attempting to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, probably because it's now run out of excuses for failing to capture significant market share against Word and Excel....." I've got two comment below the article: "Hoist on our own petard"
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OpenDocument - Formula - 0 views
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OpenDocument already supports the inclusion of arbitrary formula languages for spreadsheet documents.
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Doug Mahugh - 0 views
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This is the state of formula interoperability among ODF spreadsheets today.
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He's right, but I'm not sure this blog posting will attract as much fuss as Rob's red boxes ...
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An implementation is permitted to provide an implicit conversion from string-constant to number. However, the rules by which such conversions take place are implementation-defined. [Example: An implementation might choose to accept "123"+10 by converting the string "123" to the number 123. Such conversions might be locale-specific in that a string-constant such as "10,56" might be converted to 10.56 in some locales, but not in others, depending on the radix point character. end example]
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So in other words, OOXML doesn't say anything about string conversion either.
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The real state of ODF Interoperability? There is none : Comments from the Northwest P... - 0 views
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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.:"
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Cutting corners - the realpolitik of ODF standardisation? - The Wayback Machine Roars R... - 0 views
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From Notes2Self 2006 post we discover once again that ODF Interop problems are not new. Back in early February 2005, top ranking OASIS Executive James Clark made a comment to the OASIS OpenDocument technical Committee about the lack of interoperability for spreadsheet documents:
".... I really hope I'm missing something, because, frankly, I'm speechless. You cannot be serious. You have virtually zero interoperability for spreadsheet documents. OpenDocument has the potential to be extraodinarily valuable and important standard. I urge you not to throw away a huge part of that potential by leaving such a gaping hole in your specification...". Claus Agerskov further commented that this provided a means of creating lock-in (my emphasis)
"OpenDocument doesn't specify the formulars used in spreadsheets so every spreadsheet vendor can implement formulars in their own way without being an open standard. This way a vendor can create lock-in to their spreadsheets"
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Gray Matter : Rethinking ODF leadership - 0 views
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Is it time for Rob to step down as chair? I think so.
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Groklaw - When Would You Use OOXML and When ODF? -- What is OOXML For? - 0 views
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The legacy formats are just popped into an OOXML wrapper
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I actually think is is - to some extent - true. Apart from stuff like DrawingML, CustomML etc, OOXML is a transformation of the binary stuff and hence in essence the same document format. "Someone" told me the other day that he had knowledge of a company that didn't use the "xml-ness" of OOXMLto manipulate OOXML-files but simply considered them TEXT-files. They could do this because OOXML is very close to the binary formats.
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True, but the stuff inside is XML -- I think there's a widespread view that OOXML is a lot of lightly wrapped BLOBs
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Ok - you are possibly correct. Somehow content in a file called printerSettings.bin seem to attract higher disturbance than base64-encoded, binary attribute values with attribute name "printerSettings"
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Actually, I think the phrase someone coined that "OOXML is just the binary document formats dressed up in angle brackets" fits just fint :o)
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Whoa, whoa, whoa! - Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, May 01 2009 @ 02:21 AM EDT
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Whoa, whoa, whoa! - Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, May 01 2009 @ 03:17 AM EDT
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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?
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What Oracle Sees in Sun Microsystems | NewsFactor Network - 0 views
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Citigroup's Thill estimates Oracle could cut between 40 percent and 70 percent of Sun's roughly 33,000 employees. Excluding restructuring costs, Oracle expects Sun to add $1.5 billion in profit during the first year after the acquisition closes this summer, and another $2 billion the following year. Oracle executives declined to say how many jobs would be eliminated.
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Citigroup's Thill estimates Oracle could cut between 40 percent and 70 percent of Sun's roughly 33,000 employees. Excluding restructuring costs, Oracle expects Sun to add $1.5 billion in profit during the first year after the acquisition closes this summer, and another $2 billion the following year. Oracle executives declined to say how many jobs would be eliminated.
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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
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OpenOfficers pitch Oracle on life after Sun * The Register - 0 views
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John McCreesh, OpenOffice's head of marketing, is veering towards independence, though. He said separately he felt the "right model" is for an independent legal entity to own the trademarks and have joint copyright of the code, with its own finance and governance.
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IBM Lotus Symphony - Buzz: Document interoperability in Lotus Symphony - 0 views
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Office 2007 ( OOXML ) import support will be in the next release this quarter.
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