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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

People Use The Cloud And Don't Even Realize It - Business Insider - 0 views

www.businessinsider.com/nd-dont-even-realize-it-2014-7

wordSDK

shared by Gary Edwards on 31 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 31 Jul 14
     
    Stats on Cloud usage shows that only 29% of Internet users are using a cloud service. One of the charts provided shows that iCloud (Apple) and DropBox have over 300 million users. Microsoft OneDrive has come out of nowhere to claim the third position with 250 million. And Google Drive finishes in fourth place with 200 million. Funny that Google would be so short when gMail and Chrome have proven to be so successful. And gDOCS was a pioneer of cloud based editing of productivity documents. Office 365 has only been available on iOS since May, yet look at the numbers! Incredible. Oh, Box is also listed in fifth place with 25 million users. I'm starting to think that DropBox, RackSpace and Egnyte are in big trouble. Microsoft is on a huge roll, and my gut instinct is that they have some kind of a deal going with Apple iCloud and Office365. Amazon is surprisingly missing.
  • Gary Edwards on 31 Jul 14
     
    Stats on Cloud usage shows that only 29% of Internet users are using a cloud service. One of the charts provided shows that iCloud (Apple) and DropBox have over 300 million users. Microsoft OneDrive has come out of nowhere to claim the third position with 250 million. And Google Drive finishes in fourth place with 200 million. Funny that Google would be so short when gMail and Chrome have proven to be so successful. And gDOCS was a pioneer of cloud based editing of productivity documents. Office 365 has only been available on iOS since May, yet look at the numbers! Incredible. Oh, Box is also listed in fifth place with 25 million users. I'm starting to think that DropBox, RackSpace and Egnyte are in big trouble. Microsoft is on a huge roll, and my gut instinct is that they have some kind of a deal going with Apple iCloud and Office365. Amazon is surprisingly missing.
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

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"
Paul Merrell

U.S. top court declines to hear Microsoft antitrust case | Reuters - 0 views

in.reuters.com/...software-idINL2N0NH0Y420140428

Microsoft Novell WordPerfect antitrust

shared by Paul Merrell on 29 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday brought an end to Novell Inc's antitrust claims against Microsoft Corp that date back 20 years to the development of Windows 95 software. By declining to hear Novell's appeal, the court left intact a 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling from September 2013 in favor of Microsoft.The court of appeals unanimously affirmed the dismissal of Novell Inc's claims that Microsoft violated the Sherman Antitrust Act when it decided not to share its intellectual property while developing its Windows 95 operating system.
  • The Novell case, which was first filed in 2004, was over Microsoft's decision not to share with Novell details about its Windows operating system. Novell claimed that its suite of applications, including WordPerfect, suffered as a result of Microsoft withholding the information.Novell alleged that Microsoft used its market power in operating systems to promote its own applications.
Gary Edwards

Readium at the London Book Fair 2014: Open Source for an Open Publishing Ecosystem: Rea... - 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

Dump the file server: Why we moved to the SharePoint Online cloud [review] - 0 views

betanews.com/...sharepoint-online-cloud-review

ODF document-wars Cloud-Computing

shared by Gary Edwards on 27 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • For this article, I wanted to focus on an important aspect of our move to Office 365, and that was our adoption of SharePoint Online as our sole document file server. I know, how passé for me to call it a file server as it represents everything that fixes what plagues traditional file servers and NASes. Let's face it: file servers have been a necessary evil, not a nicety that have enabled collaboration and seamless access to data. They offer superior security and storage space, but this comes at the price of external access and coauthoring functionality. Corporate IT departments have had a band-aid known as VPN for some time now, but it falls short of being the panacea vendors like Cisco make it out to be. I know this well -- I support these kinds of VPNs day to day. Their licensing is convoluted, they're drowning in client application bug hell, and most of all, bound by the performance bottlenecks on either the client or server end.
  • I previously wrote about how my company used to juggle two distinct file storage systems. We had Google Drive as our web-based cloud document platform, buts its penetration didn't go much further than its Google Docs functionality. That's because Google has a love-hate relationship with any Office file that's not a Google Doc. Sure, you can upload it and store it on the service, but the bells and whistles end there. Want to edit it with others? It MUST be converted to Google's format. And so we had to keep a crutch in place for everything else that had to stay in traditional Office formats, either due to customer requirements, complex formatting, or other reasons. That other device for us was a simple QNAP NAS box with 1.5TB of space.
  • I previously wrote about how my company used to juggle two distinct file storage systems. We had Google Drive as our web-based cloud document platform, buts its penetration didn't go much further than its Google Docs functionality. That's because Google has a love-hate relationship with any Office file that's not a Google Doc. Sure, you can upload it and store it on the service, but the bells and whistles end there. Want to edit it with others? It MUST be converted to Google's format.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • And so we had to keep a crutch in place for everything else that had to stay in traditional Office formats, either due to customer requirements, complex formatting, or other reasons. That other device for us was a simple QNAP NAS box with 1.5TB of space.
  • We liked Google Drive's real time collaboration functionality, but the way it treated non-Docs files was pretty pitiful.
  • Dropbox for Business provides the best headroom for growth, but it's starting monthly price is too much to swallow.
  • And Box and Egnyte don't bring much more to the table besides bona fide cloud storage and sync;
  • SharePoint Online offers a rich ecosystem that we can grow on.
  • For the purpose of running our day to day business needs, SharePoint Online has taken over for both Google Drive and our former NAS alike. We don't have to convert items to and from Google Docs anymore just to collaborate. We have as good, or better, permissions in SharePoint compared to Google Drive. And the search power in SharePoint is disgustingly accurate, providing the accuracy and file previews that we were used to on Google Drive.
  • SharePoint Online is first and foremost a cloud solution that has additional tie-ins with Office Online products, OneDrive, etc that may or may not exist in the on-premise version of the product.
  • It's a cloud file server (the focus of this piece). It's a content search hub. It can run public websites and internal intranets. It can help handle complex document workflows. You can even run Access databases on it.
  • I can finally work as I wish, in-browser or in Office 2013 -- or both at once. My entire company "file server" is synced via OneDrive for Business to my Thinkpad, and likewise, I can edit any files in a browser via Office Online apps. It's a nirvana that Google Drive almost afforded us, if it weren't for Google's distaste of traditional Office files. It's good to know you can have your cake and eat it too.
  • Gary Edwards on 27 Mar 14
     
    Yesterday Google announced dramatic price reductions for their Cloud Computing platform. This announcement was followed immediately by a similar announcement from Amazon. But what about Microsoft? The truth is that Microsoft doesn't need to reduce prices, and they are forcing both Google and Amazon reductions. My guess is that there are more reductions to come too. The answer is in this review of SharePoint OnLine and Office 365, where the author points out the fact that Google Drive / Apps totally mangles an MSOffice document. Once Google converts the documents, they are useless. "I previously wrote about how my company used to juggle two distinct file storage systems. We had Google Drive as our web-based cloud document platform, buts its penetration didn't go much further than its Google Docs functionality. That's because Google has a love-hate relationship with any Office file that's not a Google Doc. Sure, you can upload it and store it on the service, but the bells and whistles end there. Want to edit it with others? It MUST be converted to Google's format. And so we had to keep a crutch in place for everything else that had to stay in traditional Office formats, either due to customer requirements, complex formatting, or other reasons. That other device for us was a simple QNAP NAS box with 1.5TB of space." In 2006-2007, when we were in the middle of the great ODF vs OOXML document wars, I had a conversation with Google's Open Source - Opoen Standards guru, Chris DiBona. It was during the Massachusetts crisis, and we were trying to garner Google Corporate support for ODF. Chris listened to my pitch and summarized his position that conversion methods were very advanced, and going forward, file formats really didn't matter. He famously said, "Let a thousand formats bloom". I wonder if he still thinks that?
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

Google Brings Native MS Office Editing Features To Its iOS Productivity Apps - 0 views

techcrunch.com/...y-apps-launches-slides-for-ios

wordSDK Office-365 Cloud-Productivity-Platform

shared by Gary Edwards on 29 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • Google’s new Material Design user interface language and all the Microsoft Office conversion goodness the company acquired when it bought Quickoffice in 2012.
  • Google is closing the loop on bringing support for natively editing Microsoft Office files to all of productivity apps today.
  • Gary Edwards on 29 Aug 14
     
    "Google is closing the loop on bringing support for natively editing Microsoft Office files to all of productivity apps today. The company's iOS apps for Docs and Sheets are getting a couple of minor new features and design updates today, but most importantly, these apps will now also be able to natively open, edit and save files from Microsoft's Office suite. After launching the original standalone apps for Google Docs and Sheets on iOS a few months ago, it was only a matter of time before Google would also free its PowerPoint competitor Slides from the Google Drive app. Today is that day. Google Slides is now available as a standalone app for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. 2014-08-25_1104Just like the Docs and Sheets apps and their counterparts on Android (the standalone Slides app launched there two months ago), the new Slides app will feature some aspects of Google's new Material Design user interface language and all the Microsoft Office conversion goodness the company acquired when it bought Quickoffice in 2012." ........................................................... Hey, Google is pulling the Cloud version of "bait and switch". The bait is calling a standalone application for iOS "native". The switch is that Microsoft is using the term "native" to describe the editing of MS Office native documents. Google is trying to market a native, written explicitly for iOS application, presenting it as "supporting native document editing and collaboration". Wow. They've got nothing!! This is just market spin. And the article's title suggests that they know exactly what they are doing with this egregious misrepresentation. There is no doubt in my mind that Microsoft has committed to the "Office 365 - native document" narrative. Its designed to totally obliterate Googe, Dropbox, Box, iCloud and anyone trying to offer Cloud based business solutions. They are going to crush Google, taking both Android and Booble Apps / GoogleDrive out of th
Paul Merrell

Los Angeles Times - latimes.com - 0 views

www.latimes.com/...st12-2009may12,0,5794982.story

antitrust IBM Google DoJ

shared by Paul Merrell on 13 May 09 - Cached
  • 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.
  • 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.
Alex Brown

Doug Mahugh : Working with ODF in Word 2007 SP2 - 0 views

blogs.msdn.com/...with-odf-in-word-2007-sp2.aspx

shared by Alex Brown on 28 Apr 09 - Cached
  • built-support for ODF 1.1.
    • Alex Brown
      Alex Brown on 28 Apr 09
       
      So, the cat is now among the pigeons ...
Jesper Lund Stocholm

Groklaw - Digging for Truth - 0 views

www.groklaw.net/comment.php

shared by Jesper Lund Stocholm on 28 Apr 09 - Cached
  • I would agree with you that ODF is better that OOXML.
    • Jesper Lund Stocholm
      Jesper Lund Stocholm on 28 Apr 09
       
      I simply love statements like these ... :o)
Jesper Lund Stocholm

The EU fight against yuck ePatents (Lessig Blog) - 0 views

www.lessig.org/...u_fight_against_yuck_epat.html

shared by Jesper Lund Stocholm on 28 Apr 09 - Cached
  • If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today�s ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete stand-still today. The solution . . . is patent exchanges . . . and patenting as much as we can. . . . A future start-up with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose. That price might be high: Established companies have an interest in excluding future competitors." Fred Warshofsky, The Patent Wars 170-71 (NY: Wiley 1994).
    • Jesper Lund Stocholm
      Jesper Lund Stocholm on 28 Apr 09
       
      A quick thought: Did Bill say that patents were bad?
Jesper Lund Stocholm

Groklaw - When Would You Use OOXML and When ODF? -- What is OOXML For? - 0 views

www.groklaw.net/article.php

shared by Jesper Lund Stocholm on 28 Apr 09 - Cached
  • The legacy formats are just popped into an OOXML wrapper
    • Alex Brown
      Alex Brown on 28 Apr 09
       
      Funny how often this old canard is brought out. Do people really belive it?
    • Jesper Lund Stocholm
      Jesper Lund Stocholm on 28 Apr 09
       
      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.
    • Alex Brown
      Alex Brown on 28 Apr 09
       
      True, but the stuff inside is XML -- I think there's a widespread view that OOXML is a lot of lightly wrapped BLOBs
    • Jesper Lund Stocholm
      Jesper Lund Stocholm on 28 Apr 09
       
      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"
    • Jesper Lund Stocholm
      Jesper Lund Stocholm on 28 Apr 09
       
      Actually, I think the phrase someone coined that "OOXML is just the binary document formats dressed up in angle brackets" fits just fint :o)
  • Whoa, whoa, whoa! - Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, May 01 2009 @ 02:21 AM EDT
  • Whoa, whoa, whoa! - Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, May 01 2009 @ 03:17 AM EDT
  • Paul Merrell on 28 Apr 09
     
    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?
Jesper Lund Stocholm

ECIS zdokumentovalo monopolní chování MS - 0 views

www.abclinuxu.cz/...ovalo-antimonopolni-chovani-ms

shared by Jesper Lund Stocholm on 24 Apr 09 - Cached
  • Řekněme, že jsem to špatně pojmenoval, ale je to totéž o čem mluvíte Vy. Pokud se podíváte např. na http://idippedut.dk/post/2008/01/Embrace-and-extend---SVG-revisited.aspx, tak možná o celé situaci pochopíte víc, než z nějakého příspěvku, který jste silně vytrhnul z kontextu.
    • Jesper Lund Stocholm
      Jesper Lund Stocholm on 24 Apr 09
       
      I always find it amusing when I am quoted in languages I do not understand a single word of. :o)
Alex Brown

Groklaw - Digging for Truth - 0 views

www.groklaw.net/comment.php

shared by Alex Brown on 22 Apr 09 - Cached
  • I'm convinced they knew about it already, although it's only a guess
    • Alex Brown
      Alex Brown on 22 Apr 09
       
      "Reasoning", Groklaw style !
  • the fact that Microsoft would have received a copy
Alex Brown

Moved by Freedom - Powered by Standards » Blog Archive » News of the Weird (A... - 0 views

standardsandfreedom.net/...news-of-the-weird-april-issue

shared by Alex Brown on 21 Apr 09 - No Cached
  • I just don’t get it
    • Alex Brown
      Alex Brown on 21 Apr 09
       
      Neither do I: but then this is not the first signal of a less than unanimous attitude towards document formats from the Old Firm.
  • The Durban 2 conference in Geneva makes me think of a bizarre mashup of the first Durban conference and what I experienced at the OOXML BRM
    • Alex Brown
      Alex Brown on 21 Apr 09
       
      Not the first time somebody seems to have got confused between issues of tynanny and totalitarianism, and ... document formats. What price perspective?
    • Jesper Lund Stocholm
      Jesper Lund Stocholm on 21 Apr 09
       
      Actually I didn't know Charles participated in the BRM?
    • Alex Brown
      Alex Brown on 21 Apr 09
       
      He didn't - this is something that Andy Updegrove published at the tim too. What price reality?
  • Alex is right. National transposition is a procedural relic. We should get the specs right out of software vendors and just skip this standardization crap that only justifies to pay useless consultants whose status is construed as some kind of impartial judge. This kind of failed processes have led us to believe that standards and norms could be somehow trusted; as it unfortunately turns out, it stops to be true when strongly applied pressure by one large private monopoly meets the weak morals of the ones in charge of ensuring the process is being duly respected. Thank you Alex, for spelling out the truth. Your lack of impartiality and your strange behaviour during the OOXML standardization process have clarified how poorly qualified you are at patronizing others and lecturing on the ISO and other standards bodies’ processes. I wish you good luck for your next job at Microsoft.
    • Alex Brown
      Alex Brown on 23 Apr 09
       
      Ah, the sound of a dummy being being spat out ...
Alex Brown

RE: [office] ODF 1.2 drafts/Committee Draft Ballot - 0 views

lists.oasis-open.org/...msg00051.html

shared by Alex Brown on 21 Apr 09 - Cached
  • I'm running the version we'll be releasing shortly, which has ODF 1.1 support, and it identifies the problem and offers to repair it
    • Alex Brown
      Alex Brown on 21 Apr 09
       
      This (slughtly cheeky) posting foreshadows what I suspect is going to be a heated debated about which implementation of ODF is more conformant and whether that matters. Despite the potential for lots of silliness in the sort term, in the long term I think this is going to be healthy for implementations, and for ODF itself (assuming the Oracle takeover of Sun doesn't unduly impact that effort).
Jesper Lund Stocholm

Front-page: What is the definition of an "existing document"? - 0 views

www.noooxml.org/...nition-of-an-existing-document

shared by Jesper Lund Stocholm on 20 Apr 09 - Cached
  • Can you provide a definition of what an "existing documents" means?
    • Jesper Lund Stocholm
      Jesper Lund Stocholm on 20 Apr 09
       
      "Existing documents" refer to both binary Microsoft Office documents as well as ECMA-376 1st Ed. documents.
  • Alex Brown on 20 Apr 09
     
    This is defined in the scope of OOXML: ISO/IEC 29500 defines a set of XML vocabularies for representing word-processing documents, spreadsheets and presentations. On the one hand, the goal of ISO/IEC 29500 is to be capable of faithfully representing the pre-existing corpus of word-processing documents, spreadsheets and presentations that had been produced by the Microsoft Office applications (from Microsoft Office 97 to Microsoft Office 2008, inclusive) at the date of the creation of ISO/IEC 29500.
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