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Gary Edwards

Sun-Bosak "Yes" Vote on ISO approval of MS OOXML - 0 views

www.ibiblio.org/...2007Jul16-081558.eml

bosak ecma iso microsoft oasis odf officeopenxml ooxml opendocument openxml

shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07 - Cached
  • We wish to make it completely clear that we support DIS 29500 becoming an ISO Standard and are in complete agreement with its stated purposes of enabling interoperability among different implementations and providing interoperable access to the legacy of Microsoft Office documents.
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07
       
      Read it and weep! Sun agrees that ODF was not designed for and is unable to meet these important market requirements
  • Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07
     
    Sun announces support for ISO approval of MS OOXML as an international standard:

    "We wish to make it completely clear that we support DIS 29500 becoming an ISO Standard and are in complete agreement with its stated purposes of enabling interoperability among different implementations and providing interoperable access to the legacy of Microsoft Office documents."

    Bosak tries to obscure this "YES" vote by pointing to their comments that Microsoft should finally reveal the MS binary secret blueprints with a mapping of the binary blueprints to OOXML. Ha Ha Ha! Now we know what Microsoft paid Sun $2 Billion for in 2004.
  • Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07
     
    Yagotta B. Kidding: The vote was "yes, with comments." That is not, per ISO rules, a "conditional" yes, it's a just-plain-yes. The comments are advisory and regardless of whether they're resolved there's no way to change the "yes" to a "no." Specifically, ISO voting procedure [1] states, "Conditional approval should be submitted as a disapproval vote." Yes, it's confusing. The way these things work, there's no way to vote "unconditional no." The options are "yes, as it currently stands" and "yes, if the following problems are addressed." That makes the enormous effort to get unconditional approval quite curious. [1] JTC1 Directives, 5th Edition, Version 3.0, Section 9.8
Gary Edwards

Once More unto the Breach: Office Open XML Conformance (A Lesson in Claiming Standards ... - 0 views

stephesblog.blogs.com/...office-open-xml.html

cdf msxml odf officeopenxml ooxml opendocument

shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07 - Cached
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07
       
      Presentation fidelity and round tripping? Looks like someone has been attention to what happened in Massachusetts.
  • As far as I can tell in the Massachusetts poster-child case, ODF has simply come to mean whatever OpenOffice.org does
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07
       
      Keep in mind orchmid that it is the OpenOffice code base that ODF is bound to. There are many instances of the OOo code base pushed by various vendors. Sun provides OpenOffice.org and StarOffice versions of the code base. Novell Open Office is the same code base. Same with Red Hat Office and IBM WorkPlace. Outside this common code base, ODF has near ZERO interoperability.
  • Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07
     
    unfortunately the MS argument that support for OOXML equals "conformance" is also the same argument used by OpenDocument supporters to prove multi vendor, multi platform, multi application support.

Gary Edwards

Office 2.0 Conference: Live Broadcast by Veodia - 0 views

www.o2con.com/DOC-1172

odf office20 ooxml

shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07
     
    Here you go! A complete video library of all the Office 2.0 conference presentations and pane discussions. For sure check out the panel on file formats with Florian Reuter, Bill Welty, Jason Harrop, Arnaud de Hors, Tom Snyder, and moi. Excellent discussion!
    The trick to scrolling is to catch the horizontal scroll bar at the bottom of the page. Scroll to the right, and the video library vertical scroll bar will appear so you can see all the vids.
    Document Formats
Gary Edwards

Why Can't We All Just Get Along? - 0 views

docs.google.com/View

cdf html odf officeopenxml ooxml opendocument universaldocument

shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07
     
    My response to Tiffany's eWEEK article, Office file formats fail to communicate, and the GCN article, Can't we just get along?. good articles both.
    My comments are the first time i've responded directly to Sun's proprietary eXtensions allegation. The truth is that we refused to release the da Vinci plug-in with the must have iX "interoperability enhancements". Sun of course totally opposed our iX proposals, insuring that ODF would fail in Massachusetts, California, Denmark, Belgium and with the EU-IDABC.
    Nice work Sun! Yeah, that's the ticket. Limit ODF's interoperability so much so that it is impossible to implement ODF, and the world willl beat a path to your door.
    Right!
    ~ge~ ~ge~
Gary Edwards

Did the W3C acknowledge CDF's potential as an office format (vs ODF) in newly public e-... - 0 views

blogs.zdnet.com/Berlind

berlind cdf foundation heintzman odf ooxml opendocument schepers w3c zdnet

shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07 - Cached
  • Along the way, both sides know that there is little margin for error. All it takes is for one slip-up in messaging, one missed appointment, one mistake or one technical snafu to create a hole that the other side will gladly drive a Mack truck through. The stakes are so high that both sides have done a remarkable if not awe-inspiring (though not always commendable) job in executing their global full court presses. For the ODF community, it’s relatively minor to have a few dissenters like Edwards and Hiser break ranks. But, should the W3C concur with Edwards and Hiser that CDF is the more sensible candidate (than ODF) to be the world’s international open standard for universal document interop and portability, solidarity around ODF could weaken. And any weakening of solidarity around ODF is exactly the sort of hole that Microsoft would look to drive a truck through. If an indicator from the W3C that CDF is better-suited for ODF’s job than ODF could lead to such a hole, a similar indicator from IBM would be disastrous for the ODF community. Although it’s nothing more than a wild guess on my behalf, I’m willing to bet that IBM is probably responsible for more than 40 percent of the global resources being brought to bear on ODF’s behalf, if not 50 or 60 (percent). Microsoft wouldn’t need a Mack truck to take advantage of an IBM insinuation that ODF is non-strategic (or, “transitional” as Edwards said to me in an e-mail). Global support for ODF would very likely unravel because of how many people from governments to businesses to the ISO would feel betrayed and Microsoft’s OOXML would be left as the only format standing. The ODF coalition might live to see another day and another battle with CDF as their savior, but the damage would very likely be irreversible given the long memories of most of those who were betrayed.
  • Whereas the W3C has very little riding on ODF (Format), IBM has everything riding on it. Alright, not everything. IBM is involved in plenty of other businesses. But, after investing so much in ODF and now being so close to its best shot at seeking the aforementioned revenge, the last thing Big Blue can afford is a material breakdown in the world’s interest in ODF.
  • The question now is whether that moment has arrived for Gary Edwards and Sam Hiser in whole or in part, or maybe not at all. In response to my post, Doug Schepers, the primary contact at the W3C for CDF commented that in his eyes, it was simply an “honest misunderstanding on their part, and perhaps overenthusiasm.” Edwards, who over the weekend, disclosed to me the exact content of his e-mails with Schepers clearly had enough and simply published those e-mails here on ZDNet under the heading An Honest Misunderstanding? Hardly! Play the tape!. You can read the e-mails yourself. But, if there’s any text in them that vindicates Edwards and Hiser, it’s the part where Schepers wrote the following to them (I’ve boldfaced the most salient point):
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • So, what do you think? Do Edwards and Hiser have more credibility now that this e-mail has come to light?
Gary Edwards

Front-page: Matusow backs the French proposal? - 0 views

www.noooxml.org/...usow-backs-the-french-proposal

afnor cdf merger odf ooxml opendocument

shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07 - Cached
  • But markets and governments understand that Open Document is the appropriate standard to replace the old Microsoft binary formats for office communication.
  • Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07
     
    When did this happen? Th eonly thing markets and government pilot studies show is that it's IMPOSSIBLE to convert existing MSOffice documents to ODF. And even if you are able to do a lossy conversion, there is no way to convert back again without serious loss processing specific informaiton. (round tripping - which is critical to business process document exchange and routing).
Gary Edwards

Former ODF Leaders Turn Hopes to Compound Document Format - 0 views

www.eweek.com/...0,1895,2227541,00.asp

cdf foundation galli good odf ooxml opendocument w3c

shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07 - Cached
  • Editor's Note: This is the third in a series of articles that examine why the ODF Foundation closed down. The leaders of the recently shuttered OpenDocument Foundation have moved their attention and efforts away from the Open Document Format and towards the W3C's Compound Document Format, which they believe will be able to neutralize Microsoft Office by repurposing those documents.
Gary Edwards

Inside PDF: CDF - 0 views

blogs.adobe.com/...cdf.html

adobe cdf odf ooxml pdf

shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07 - Cached
  • The real technical content of the CDF recommendations is in details of how to glue these various (XML markup) languages together once they all have been processed into their respective DOMs. It establishes conventions for how a script might reach across DOM boundaries, how events might get propagated across DOM boundaries and stuff like that. I won't go into this any deeper because you will get more accurate information by just reading the W3C documents. But the main idea of CDF is to bring these variously defined content types into a uniform "framework" so that scripts can operate more at a document level instead of being confined to their own document child.
Gary Edwards

The Future is CDF | Metaphorical Web - Kurt Cagle - 0 views

metaphoricalweb.blogspot.com

cagle cdf ms-ooxml odf officeopenxml opendocument wicd

shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07 - Cached
  • As editing increasingly moves onto the web, its safe to say that the document of choice will be neither ODF nor OOXML, both of which gain their power on the basis of supporting legacy word processing systems. Instead, what seems to be emerging from the W3C is something that is not an office suite because it didn’t evolve from one, but that nonetheless is capable of most if not all of the same functions that office suite documents pose.
Gary Edwards

Play the tape!!! The W3C eMails to the Foundation tell a differenct story | OpenDocumen... - 0 views

talkback.zdnet.com/5208-10741-0.html

berlind cdf ms-ooxml odf schepers w3c wicd zdnet

shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07 - Cached
  • An honest misunderstanding? Hardly! Play the tape! Instead of arguing about who said what when, let's just go to the record and see exactly what the W3C's Doug Schepers said to us in an eMail introducing himself. Keep in mind that we did not contact the W3C or Mr. Schepers. The following eMail was most welcome, but entirely unsolicited.
  • Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07
     
    The W3C's Doug Schepers joins the discussion claiming that the Foundation misunderstood his eMail messages.   We say otherwise!

    There is of course one way to settle this: PLAY THE TAPE!

    So here it is.

    ~ge~

Gary Edwards

OpenDocument Format community steadfast despite theatrics of now impotent 'Foundation' ... - 0 views

talkback.zdnet.com/5206-10741-0.html

berlind cdf odf ooxml

shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07 - Cached
  • ODF was dead-on-arrival not because it's a better or worse choice than OOXML (I have no idea which is better, really) but because the nature of those with UNIX DNA never allows these kinds of "open" agreements to succeed. They all just splinter. Every time.
  • Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07
     
    The sad thing is that in early January of 2003, it was proposed that we start with a clean slate effort based on structural document generics instead of accepting the OpenOffice XML spec, and trying to strip out the application specific settings.  History will record that we accepted the OpenOffice XML spec, and were unable, after five years of effort (2002-2007) to clean things up.

    Perhaps ODF was doomed almost from the start.  The UNiX suggestion is interesting if not an arrow through the core.

Gary Edwards

Cheers for the Prince - More Cagle Championing CDF | O'Reilly XML Blog - 0 views

www.oreillynet.com/...cheers_for_the_prince.html

cagle cdf css prince xhtml xml

shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07 - Cached
  • In other words, I would like to lay out my printable documents in a way that’s familiar to me, for which I have tools that can support this and that can easily be changed without having to do a search and replace through a hundred distance instances of a paragraph. In short, I want CSS, acting on XHTML, generating my printed pages as readily as it displays that content to the screen. A previous blog from Michael Day about PrinceXML reminded me that I hadn’t had a chance to play with it. My previous experiences with XHTML to PDF conversion were, to put it bluntly, terrifying, and so, as I was downloading the JAR file I wasn’t expecting a lot. When I tried it, I wasn’t disappointed … I was stunned. I had taken an article that I’d recently written for XML.com and run it through Prince. It digested the ten page article and cranked out a PDF in under a second, and the quality was better than anything I’d been able to get with a straight DocBook/FO/PDF rendering. I looked up the documentation, and found that it supported the CSS 3.0 page rendering set, as well as support for columns (including columnar rules), it could be used to print SVG content embedded or linked to the main XHTML document, and it included a nice set of extension properties for handling headers and footers, internal links, rounded borders, and the full panoply of CSS selectors including nth-child (which seemingly no one supports), content search and the whole gamut of pseudo-classes.
Gary Edwards

ODF 1.2 Metadata? You're Dreaming! Microsoft starts rolling out more OOXML translators... - 0 views

talkback.zdnet.com/5208-12558-0.html

cdf ge mary-jo metadata microsoft odf ooxml opendocument shish

shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07 - No Cached
  • Sorry Shish, you're wrong about ODF 1.2 Try ODF 1.5 or ODF 2.0, maybe. The metadata requirements for ODF 1.2 actually did include two way lossless translation capability. Unfortunately these features did not survive the final cut, and were not included in the April 2007 submission. You might also want to check the February 23, 2007 metadata proposal from Florian Reuter. That also would have delivered the goods and perhaps put ODF that grand convergence category of usefulness across desktops, servers, devices and web systems currently the exclusive domains of MS-OOXML and CDF+. Florian had devised a means of using metadata to describe the presentation aspects of content and structural objects. Very revolutionary. And based on the simple notion that bold, font, margins etc. are simply metadata about content and style objects. Where the train came off the track had to do with the concept of an XML ID means of linking metadata to content. Not that there was anything wrong with this mechanism. It's actually quite clever. What went wrong was that Sun insisted that only those elements approved and supported by OpenOffice would be allowed to make use of XML ID metadata. For independent developers, this is a serious constraint. Because of this constraint, the metatdata sub committee started off with six elements supported by OOo that metadata could be appied to. IBM then came in and asked for eleven more elements having to do with charts and graphs. The OpenOffice crew decided they could support this, so in they went. Then an interesting question was posed, "How are independent developers supposed to submit elements for metadata consideration?"
Gary Edwards

ODF 1.2? You're dreaming! Microsoft starts rolling out more OOXML translators | Mary... - 0 views

blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft

cdf mary-jo metadata odf ooxml opendocument zdnet

shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07 - Cached
  • Over the next three months, Microsoft will be releasing new and updated translators designed to aid  customers who want interoperability between Microsoft’s Office Open XML (OOXML) and other document formats, including Open Document Format (ODF). On December 4, Microsoft began rolling out three new translators that it plans to make available this month: A 1.1 update of its translator for Word; an Open XML spreadsheet translator and a presentation translator. Additionally, in February 2008, Microsoft will deliver the final version of its translator designed to provide interoperability between the Chinese-government backed Uniform Office Format (UOF) file format and OOXML. Microsoft announced the creation of the SourceForge-hosted Open Translation Project in July 2006. At that time, the Softies said the translator-focused initiatve was started “in response to government requests for interoperability with ODF because they work with constituent groups that use that format.” Vijay Rajagopalan, a Microsoft Principal Architect, provided the update on the OOXML-ODF translation work during the XML 2007 conference on Decmeber 4. During the XML 2007 interoperability panel — sponsored by Microsoft and of which Rajagopalan was a part — the ongoing battles that have raged for the past couple of years between Microsoft and the backers of ODF were a mere sidenote.
Gary Edwards

Prince: What's New - Docuemnt Publishing on Steroids with XHTML - CSS 3.0 (CDF+) - 0 views

www.princexml.com

cagle cdf css w3c xhtml

shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07 - Cached
  • Prince is a computer program that converts XML and HTML into PDF documents. Prince can read many XML formats, including XHTML and SVG. Prince formats documents according to style sheets written in CSS. Standards support HTML, CSS, SVG, MathML Web enabled Load documents, style sheets, images and fonts over HTTP Publishing features Hyphenation, crop marks, columns, page floats and footnotes Eye candy Rounded borders, small caps, CMYK and RGBA colors
Gary Edwards

Open Document Format: The sad truth | Scott Mace Information Manager Journal - 0 views

scottmace.typepad.com/...open-document-f.html

berlind cdf foundation mace odf ooxml opendocument

shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07 - Cached
  • Open Document Format: The sad truth David Berlind has posted a massive chronicle of who said what to whom about the supposed emergence of CDF as an alternative to Open Document Format (ODF) and OOXML. I played a minor role in this saga when I spoke with Gary Edwards for Opening Move, back in April. This was before Edwards proposed CDF in place of ODF. If you haven't listened to our conversation, please do so, because the concerns Edwards raised about ODF (and OOXML) remain just as valid today. While I'm sad to see Edwards' more recent direction and assertions debunked in the press and the blogosphere, the greater tragedy is of two competing document standards -- ODF and OOXML -- now on seemingly irreversible paths to immortality, meaning we'll have translation issues between them around for several lifetimes to come.
Gary Edwards

open...: Oh, Tell Me the Truth About...the ODF Bust-Up - 0 views

opendotdotdot.blogspot.com/...ruth-aboutthe-odf-bust-up.html

shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07 - Cached
  • Oh, Tell Me the Truth About...the ODF Bust-Up The recent decision by the OpenDocument Foundation to shift its energies away from ODF to CDF has naturally provoked a lot of rather exaggerated comment. I wrote a piece for LWN.net (now out from behind the paywall) exploring what exactly was going on, and found out that there are bigger issues than simply document interoperability at play.It turns out to be all about Microsoft's Sharepoint - software that I am beginning to see as one of the most serious threats to open source today. Read it and be very afraid.
Gary Edwards

Compound Document Format and OpenDocument Foundation (Updated 20071109) « Cyb... - 0 views

ctrambler.wordpress.com/...at-and-opendocument-foundation

shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07 - Cached
  • The first time I heard about OpenDocument Foundation people not happy with ODF is from Stephen McGibbon post about Gary Edwards disagreement with Sun. Then comes Rob Weir’s that OpenDocument Foundation had moved away from OpenDocumentFormat. With Rob Weir post I sense some crack in OpenDocument Foundation over ODF. While Weir’s post continues its tradition of building up evidence to support his argument, he is known to be a very passionate guy about ODF and is not shy about attacking opposition, any opposition to ODF. Hence, in this respect, I believe I have to exercise a certain amount of caution when Weir start attacking someone new. Today, I came across Jason Matusow’s happy rambling about how OpenDocument Foundation is unhappy about ODF and appears to be supporting a single document format. Matusow view it as an argument that the “one document format” theory does not work. More on this later. Hmmm… Did OpenDocument Foundation change direction away from ODF? and what is this Compound Document Format (CDF) thing that seems to be the new love of OpenDocument Foundation.
Gary Edwards

Novell adds fuel to the fire in OOXML feud - News - Builder AU - 0 views

www.builderau.com.au/...0,339028227,339284338,00.htm

shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07 - Cached
  • Microsoft has created its own proprietary document format, Office Open XML (OOXML), as a rival to the community-developed OpenDocument Format (ODF). OOXML is used in Microsoft's latest applications suite, Office 2007. Despite some efforts by the two camps, ODF and OOXML are, for the most part, not interoperable, meaning documents that are created in one format cannot be successfully read by applications based on the other format. According to Novell's vice president of developer platforms, Miguel de Icaza, the situation won't change in the foreseeable future. Want to know more? For all the latest news, analysis and opinion on open source, click here "There's no end in sight to the ongoing disputes between the two camps," said de Icaza, speaking at XML 2007, a Microsoft-sponsored event, on Tuesday. "In 2006, there was lots of FUD [fear, uncertainty and doubt] about the problems behind OOXML and it went downhill from there," Icaza said. "Neither group is willing to make the big changes required for real compatibility," de Icaza added.
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07
       
      What efforts are you talking about? The last time any effort was made to accomodate interoperability was in 2003 with the establishment of the ODF "Compatibilty clause" (Section 1.5). "Despite some efforts by the two camps, ODF and OOXML are, for the most part, not interoperable, meaning documents that are created in one format cannot be successfully read by applications based on the other format......" Section 1.5 authorizes the use of "foreign elements" and "alien attributes". These techniques were specifically written into ODF for handling unknown characteristics of existing MSOffice documents (binary and/or xml) on conversion to ODF. Since the Section 1.5 addition in 2003, every other suggestion to improve interop between ODF and MSOffice documents has been rejected by the OASIS ODF TC and Sub Committees. There are three problems with Section 1.5. The first is that there is only so much that can be done with foreign elements and alien attributes. There are still remaining compatibility issues relating to the basic structures of lists, tables, fields, sections and page dymnamics. The OpenDocument Foundaiton spent over a year trying to get approval for five generic elements relating to these structures, without success. As i said, there has not been a single successful comatibility - interoperability effort since 2003, although many have been proposed. The second reason for the failure of Section 1.5 is that OpenOffice only partially implements the "Compatibility Clause". OOo only recognizes "foreign elements and alien attributes" with text spans and paragraphs. The third reason is that "compatibility" is optional in ODF. The clause does not have any teeth. Applications can implement only those aspects of the spec they feel like implementing, and still be in total "compliance". This creates serious interop problem not only for MSOffice plug-in comverted documents, but also renders as
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