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Gary Edwards

In Mobile, Fragmentation is Forever. Deal With It. - washingtonpost.com - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...AR2010030402374.html

webkit-html5 OpenWeb-Standards Web-apps OpenWeb-Productivity-Platform

shared by Gary Edwards on 04 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 04 Mar 10
     
    I disagree with the authors conclusions here.  He misses some very significant developments.  Particularly around Google, WebKit, and WebKit-HTML5. For instance, there is this article out today; "Google Really is Giving Away Free Nexus One and Droid Handsets to Developers".  Also, Palm is working on a WiMAX/WiFi version of their WebOS (WebKit) smartphone for Sprint.  Sprint and ClearWire are pushing forward with a very aggressive WiMAX rollout in the USA.  San Francisco should go on line this year!   One of the more interesting things about the Sprint WiMAX plan is that they have a set fee of $69.00 per month that covers EVERYTHING; cellphone, WiMAX Web browsing, video, and data connectivity, texting (SMS) and VOIP.  Major Sprint competitors, Verizon, AT&T and TMobile charge $69 per month, but it only covers cellphone access.  Everything else is extra adn also at low speed/ low bandwidth.  3G at best.  WiMAX however is a 4G screamer.  It's also an open standard.  (Verizon FIOS and LTE are comparable and said to be coming soon, but they are proprietary technologies).   The Cable guys are itneresting in that they are major backers of WiMAX, but also have a bandwidth explosive technology called Docsis. There is an interesting article at TechCrunch, "In Mobile, Fragmentation is Forever. Deal With It."  I disagree entirely with the authors conclusion.  WebKit is capable of providing a universal HTML5 application developers layer for mobile and desktop browser computing.  It's supported by Apple, Google, Palm (WebOS), Nokia, RiMM (Blackberry) and others to such an extent that 85% of all smartphones shipped this year will either ship with WebKit or, an Opera browser compatible with the WebKit HTML5 document layout/rendering model.   I would even go as far as to say that WebKit-HTML5 owns the Web's document model and application layer for the future.  Excepting for Silverlight, which features the OOXML document model with over 500 million desktop develop
Gary Edwards

Microsoft Links Office With Win 7 - IBD - Investors.com - 0 views

www.investors.com/...t-Links-Office-With-Win-7.aspx

MSOffice-2010 OOXML-Interop

shared by Gary Edwards on 04 Jun 10 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 04 Jun 10
     
    In this interview with Microsoft's Chris Capossela, he admits that OOXML is not an interoperable format - that using OOXML will result in a loss of productivity.   excerpt: "The collaboration experience end users are going to have with Office 2010 and the Web applications in the browser and Office on the phone is far superior to anything out there, whether it's from Google or anybody else. And the increase in costs to do what they're suggesting and the decrease in productivity that's going to result is something that customers will see, and then they'll choose Microsoft. The best example of that is just sharing a document. Just taking an Office document that was built in the rich client that has a piece of smart art and a watermark or a header or a footer, and then when I share that with you and you open it in the Office Web app, it looks absolutely identical to what I created. When you make edits to it and save it and I open it back up, I see exactly the edits you made and all the stuff I had in there originally. If you do that exact same thing with Google or Zoho or OpenOffice, you lose stuff. And that means loss of productivity."
Gary Edwards

How Microsoft Ratted Itself Out Of Office | Michael Hickins | BNET - 0 views

industry.bnet.com/...ft-ratted-itself-out-of-office

MSOffice-productivity michael-hickins google-wave ooxml

shared by Gary Edwards on 14 Jul 09 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 14 Jul 09
     
    Another good article form Michael Hickins, this time linking the success of Google Wave to the success of Microsoft OOXML. Rob Weir jumps in to defend , well, i'm not sure. I did however respond. Excerpt: Developers hoping to hitch a ride on Google's Wave have discovered that Microsoft may have unwittingly helped them resolve the single greatest problem they needed to overcome in order to challenge the dominance of Office. When Microsoft set out to create Office 2007 using a brand new code base - Office Open XML (OOXML) - it needed to accomplish two goals: make it compatible with all previous versions of Office, and have it accepted as a standard file format for productivity tools so that governments could continue using it while complying with rules forcing them to use standards-based software. ..... Depending on your perspective, either Microsoft has sowed the seeds of its own undoing, or international standards bodies succeeded in forcing Microsoft to open itself up. Either way, Microsoft has given away the key to compatibility with Office documents, allowing all comers to overcome the one barrier that has heretofore prevented customers from dumping Microsoft's Office suite.
Gary Edwards

XML Production Workflows? Start with the Web and XHTML - 1 views

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

OpenWeb XML XHTML-CSS HTML5-CSS3-JavaScript IDML

shared by Gary Edwards on 01 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Using the Web as a Production Platform
  • Gary Edwards on 01 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

Compound Document Format and OpenDocument Foundation (Updated 2007-11-09) « C... - 1 views

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

cyber-rambler OOXML-ODF-CDF

shared by Gary Edwards on 18 Jul 10 - 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 on 18 Jul 10
     
    Comments from Sam Hiser, Gary Edwards and Paul Merrill.  Excellent review of the OOXML-ODF-CDF argument.  W3C CDF work was officially cancelled, July of 2010.  The long awaited "interoperability" version of ODF, known as ODF 1.2, was released to final consideration by the OASIS community in July of 2010.  That's about three years late.  Also, they did not fix the ordered list problem :)  ha ha ha.  Broken, impossible to fix with the OOo - KDE dual application approach.  Just like we said it would be.  Morons.
Gary Edwards

Crocodoc's HTML Document Viewer Infiltrates the Enterprise | Xconomy - 0 views

www.xconomy.com/...wer-infiltrates-the-enterprise

crocodoc HTML5

shared by Gary Edwards on 15 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 15 Dec 12
     
    Excellent report on Crocodoc and their ability to convert MANY different document file types to HTML5.  Including all MSOffice formats - OOXML, ODF, and PDF. " Crocodoc, and took on the much larger problem of allowing groups to collaborate on editing a document online, no matter what the document type: PowerPoint, PDF, Word, Photoshop, JPEG, or PNG. In the process, they had to build an embeddable viewer that could take apart any document and reassemble it accurately within a Web browser. And as soon as they'd finished that, they had to tear their own system apart and rebuild it around HTML5 rather than Flash, the Adobe multimedia format that's edging closer and closer to extinction. The result of all that iterating is what's probably the world's most flexible and faithful HTML5-based document viewer: when you open a PDF, PowerPoint, or Word document in Crocodoc, the Web version looks exactly like the native version, even though it's basically been stripped down and re-rendered from scratch. When I talked with Damico in February of 2011, the startup had visions of building on this technology to become a kind of central, Web-based clearinghouse for everyone's documents-a cross between Scribd, Dropbox, and Google Docs, but with a focus on consumers, and with prettier viewing tools. In the last year, though, Crocodoc's direction has changed dramatically. Damico and his colleagues realized that it would be smarter to partner with the fastest growing providers of document-sharing services and social business-tool providers than to try to compete with them. "The massive, seismic change for us is that we had a huge opportunity to partner with Dropbox and LinkedIn and SAP and Yammer, and let them build on top of Crocodoc and make it into a core piece of their own products," Damico says. In other words, every time an office worker opens a document from within a Web app like Dropbox or Yammer, they're activating a white-label version
Gary Edwards

MarkLogic - Connectors and Toolkits - 0 views

www.marklogic.com/...connectors-and-toolkits.html

sursen webdocbase MSOffice-productivity MSOffice-Web-Apps SharePoint

shared by Gary Edwards on 25 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 25 Nov 10
     
    Excellent product release.  MarkLogic is trying to become the Google Search, Organize and Work for all things MSOffice.  Focus on MSOffice 2007 OOXML documents.
Gary Edwards

Is the Apps Marketplace just playing catchup to Microsoft? | Googling Google | ZDNet.com - 0 views

blogs.zdnet.com/Google

shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Take the basic communication, calendaring, and documentation enabled for free by Apps Standard Edition, add a few slick applications from the Marketplace and the sky was the limit. Or at least the clouds were.
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 12 Mar 10
       
      Google Apps have all the basic elements of a productivity environment, but lack the internal application messaging, data connectivity and exchange that made the Windows desktop productivity platform so powerful.   gAPPS are great.  They even have copy/paste! But they lack the basics needed for simple "merge" of client and contact data into a wordprocessor letter/report/form/research paper. Things like DDE, OLE, ODBC, MAPI, COM, and DCOM have to be reinvented for the Open Web.   gAPPS is a good place to start.  But the focus has got to shift to Wave technologies like OT, XMPP and JSON.  Then there are the lower level innovations such as Web Sockets, Native Client, HTML5, and the Cairo-Skia graphics layer (thanks Florian).
  • Whether you (or your business) choose a Microsoft-centered solution that now has well-implemented cloud integration and tightly coupled productivity and collaboration software (think Office Live Web Apps, Office 2010, and Sharepoint 2010) or you build a business around the web-based collaboration inherent in Google Apps and extend its core functions with cool and useful applications, you win.
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 12 Mar 10
       
      Not true!!! The Microsoft Cloud is based on proprietary technologies, with the Silverlight-OOXML runtime/plug-in at the core of a WPF-.NET driven "Business Productivity Platform. The Google Cloud is based on the Open Web, and not the "Open Web" that's tied up in corporate "standards" consortia like the W3C, OASIS and Ecma. One of the reasons i really like WebKit is that they push HTML5 technologies to the edge, submitting new enhancements back into the knuckle dragging W3C HTML5 workgroups as "proposals".  They don't however wait for the entangled corporate politics of the W3C to "approve and include" these proposals.  Google and Apple submit and go live simultaneously.   This of course negates the heavy influence platform rivals like Microsoft have over the activities of corporate standards orgs.  Which has to be done if WebKit-HTML5-JavaScript-XMPP-OT-Web Sockets-Native Client family of technologies is ever to challenge the interactive and graphical richness of proprietary Microsoft technologies (Silverlight, OOXML, DrawingML, C#). The important hedge here is that Google is Open Sourcing their enhancements and innovations.  Without that Open Sourcing, i think there would be reasons to fear any platform player pushing beyond the corporate standards consortia approval process.  For me, OSS balances out the incredible influence of Google, and the ownership they have over core Open Web productivity application components. Which is to say; i don't want to find myself tomorrow in the same position with a Google Open Web Productivity Platform, that i found myself in with the 1994 Windows desktop productivity environment - where Microsoft owned every opportunity, and could take the marketshare of any Windows developed application with simple announcements that they to will enter that application category.  (ex. the entire independent contact/project management category was wiped out by mere announcement of MS Outlook).
Gary Edwards

More details on Microsoft's free Office: Crippled Business Processes | Beyond Binary - ... - 0 views

news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-20001979-56.html

Office-Starter MSOffice MSOffice-2010

shared by Gary Edwards on 11 Apr 10 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 11 Apr 10
     
    Microsoft's free "Office Starter" suite will be able to fully open and display complex OOXML - 2010 MSOffice documents.  But they will not be able to execute macros or edit embedded logic such as Scripts, Macros, OLE, and ODBC connectors.  That's a killer for workgroup-workflow oriented business documents.  A category of "compound documents that includes forms, reports, compound documents and workflow logic. As for what users can do with the applications, Capossela said that Word will be capable of opening and displaying even the most complex documents. However, Office Starter users won't be able to use macros, create automated tables of contents, or add comments, though they will see comments added by others. The approach with Excel is similar, with users able to view and edit documents, but not create their own pivot tables and pivot charts, for example.
Gary Edwards

CSS Advanced Layout Module | W3C CSS3 Specification - 0 views

www.w3.org/css3-layout

css3 HTML-CSS w3c

shared by Gary Edwards on 11 Mar 11 - Cached
  • The properties in this specification work by associating a layout policy with an element.
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 11 Mar 11
       
      The CSS3 "Layout Policy" is one of the primary differentials between HTML5-CSS3-SVG and XML alternatives ODF and OOXML. Neither ODF or OOXML provide a complete description (semantic) of the underlying document layout model.
  • these policies give an element an invisible grid for aligning descendant elements
  • Gary Edwards on 11 Mar 11
     
    CSS is a simple, declarative language for creating style sheets that specify the rendering of HTML and other structured documents. This specification is part of level 3 of CSS ("CSS3") and contains features to describe layouts at a high level, meant for tasks such as the positioning and alignment of "widgets" in a graphical user interface or the layout grid for a page or a window, in particular when the desired visual order is different from the order of the elements in the source document. Other CSS3 modules contain properties to specify fonts, colors, text alignment, list numbering, tables, etc. The features in this module are described together for easier reading, but are usually not implemented as a group. CSS3 modules often depend on other modules or contain features for several media types. Implementers should look at the various "profiles" of CSS, which list consistent sets of features for each type of media.
Gary Edwards

Introducing discussions in Google Docs - Docs Blog - 2 views

googledocs.blogspot.com/...iscussions-in-google-docs.html

gDocs Wave Collaborative-computing cloud-computing

shared by Gary Edwards on 16 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 16 Mar 11
     
    Wave has finally taken over gDOCS.  Entirely.  Are you paying attention Florian and Jason?  This is it.  Your ship has come in.  The final key for Google will be that of being able to work with native OOXML documents, in a Wave, without breaking them.  Round-trip of in-process compound business productivity documents is the last part of the puzzle Google needs to crack the mighty Microsoft monopoly. excerpt: "When we launched the new Google Docs last April, one of the big changes was moving comments to the sidebar and letting people reply to comments. Today, we're updating comments in Google Docs to facilitate rapid and seamless discussions and integrate with email in an intuitive way. Since there are a number of significant" improvements, this update is only available for newly created documents for now.
Gary Edwards

Shine on Silverlight and Windows with XAML * The Register : Tim Anderson - 0 views

www.theregister.co.uk/...page2.html

xaml wpf silverlight tim-anderson

shared by Gary Edwards on 04 Jun 09 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 04 Jun 09
     
    Excellent explanation and review from the Tim Anderson. I wonder how i missed this? Here is the summary statement: "..... You can also extend XAML with custom objects. The main requirement is that classes used in XAML must have a parameterless constructor. The procedure is straightforward. Define a class; make sure your application has a reference to the assembly containing the class; then add a namespace declaration for the assembly. You can then define elements in XAML that map to your class, and at runtime these will become object instances. XAML has a curious story when it comes to formatted text, especially in Silverlight. In one sense it is rather limited. XAML has no understanding of common formats such as HTML, CSS or RTF, let alone the fancy new OOXML. Silverlight developers have to interact with the browser DOM in order to display HTML." "... No escaping it: Silverlight .XAP bundle preserves the original XAML. That said, XAML with WPF actually is a document format. The full WPF has an element called FlowDocument and rich formatting capabilities. Silverlight lacks FlowDocument, but does have a TextBlock with basic formatting options via the inline object. It also supports the Glyph element. This is interesting because it is the core element in XPS, Microsoft's invented-here alternative to Adobe's PDF." ".... XPS uses a subset of XAML to describe fixed layouts. In consequence, and with some compromises, you can use Silverlight to display XPS." "..... The bottom line is that XAML is a way of programming .NET declaratively. Its more intricate features improve the mapping between XAML and .NET. The result is we have design tools like Microsoft's Expression Blend and a clean separation between UI objects and program code, which is a considerable achievement." ".... As ever there's a downside, and with Microsoft it's the classic: this is thoroughly proprietary, and the schema issues make it difficult to validate with standard XML tools." No
Gary Edwards

Death of The Document - CIO Central - CIO Network - Forbes - 0 views

blogs.forbes.com/...death-of-the-document

forbes visual-documents visually-immersive static-documents compound-documents

shared by Gary Edwards on 29 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 29 Apr 11
     
    Well, not quite.  More IBM happy talk about interoperability and easy document interchange.  While i agree with the static versus interactive - collaborative document perspective, it's far more complicated. Today we have a world of "native"  docs and "visual" docs.   Native docs are bound to their authoring productivity environment, and are stubbornly NOT interchangeable.  Even for ODF and OOXML formats. Visual documents are spun from natives, and they are highly interchangeable, but interactively limited.  They lack the direct interaction of native authoring environments.  The Visual document phenomenon starts with PDF and the virtual print driver.  Any authoring application(s) in a productivity environment can print a PDF using the magic of the virtual print driver.   In 2008, when ISO stamped PDF with "accessibility tags", a new, highly interactive version of PDF was offically recognized.  We know this as "Tagged PDF".  And it has led the sweeping revolution of wide implementation of the paperless transaction process. The Visual Document phenomenon doesn't stop there.  The highly mobile WebKit revolution ushered in by the 2008 iPhone phenomenon led to wide acceptance of highly interactive and collaborative, but richly visual versions of SVG and HTML5-CSS3-JSON-JavaScript documents. Today we have SVG-HTML+ type visually immersive documents spun out of Server side publication presses such as FlipBoard, Cognito cComics, QWiki, Needle, Sports Illustrated, Push Pop Press, and TreeSaver to name but a few.   Clearly the visually immersive category of documents is exploding, but not for business - productivity documents.  Adobe has proposed a "CSS Regions" standard for richly immersive layout that might change that.  But mostly i think the problem for business documents, reports and forms is that they are "compound documents" bound to desktop productivity environments and workgroups. The great transition from desktop/workgroup productivity environme
Gary Edwards

TextMaker Viewer 2010 Opens Office Documents Quick and Easy - Office - Lifehacker - 0 views

lifehacker.com/...ffice-documents-quick-and-easy

MSOffice OOXML-Viewer

shared by Gary Edwards on 12 May 10 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 12 May 10
     
    With Office 2010 already available to corporations, documents you can't quite open in Office 2007 are soon to appear in your inbox. If you're not upgrading, or never use Office anyways, TextMaker Viewer is a light, snappy document viewing option. TextMaker Viewer actually opens a huge range of word processing files, including Office, OpenOffice.org, the TextMaker app this viewer derives from, and all the standard low-tech formats like HTML, TXT, and RTF. Microsoft offers its own viewers, but only the PowerPoint Viewer has made it up to 2010 compatibility so far. Beyond that, TextMaker is a very lightweight application, so opening huge files likely won't choke up your system as thoroughly. TextMaker Viewer 2010 is a free download for Windows systems only. There does seem to be an issue with registering the free version to turn off the "nag" screen on launching, but after a few starts, a checkbox to hide that screen does appear.
Gary Edwards

Compatibility matters: The Lessons of Massachusetts - 0 views

www.diigo.com/...compatibility-matters

msoffice ooxml odf openoffice massachusetts productivity-environment bound-business-processes MSOffice-ecosystem unified-productivity compatibility interoperability

shared by Gary Edwards on 15 Jul 09 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 15 Jul 09
     
    Gary Edwards's List: Compatibility matters - The lessons of Massachusetts are many. Application level "compatibility" with existing MSOffice desktops and workgroups is vital. Format level "compatibility" with the legacy of billions of binary documents is vital. And "ecosystem" compatibility with the MSOffice productivity environment.
Gary Edwards

Aspose.Word for NET 5.3.0 (Windows), from Aspose Pty Ltd - Software Downloads - TechRep... - 0 views

software.techrepublic.com.com/abstract.aspx

aspose.net word MSWord ooxml

shared by Gary Edwards on 30 Jul 09 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 30 Jul 09
     
    Overview: Aspose.Word is a powerful .NET component that allows any .NET application to work with Microsoft Word documents without utilizing Microsoft Word and Office Automation. Aspose.Word supports a wide array of features including new document creation, document manipulation, powerful mail merge abilities, exporting to multiple formats (DOC, PDF & HTML) and much, much more. Aspose.Word is truly the most affordable, fastest, feature rich Word component on the market. Aspose.Word application programming interface (API) is powerful and easy to use at the same time. Classes, properties and method names are easy to remember and understand: for example, Document represents a Word document, DocumentBuilder is responsible for building a document dynamically, and so on. Although this guilde provides many code samples, intuitively understandable interface allows you create working document producing applications having minimal knowledge of C# or VB.NET and Microsoft Word features. $899
Gary Edwards

Compatibility Matters: The Lessons of Massachusetts - 0 views

docs.google.com/View

lessons-of-massachusetts compatibility interoperability ODF OOXML MSOffice OpenOffice document-wars

shared by Gary Edwards on 15 Jul 09 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 15 Jul 09
     
    This document discusses the primary reason ODF failed in Massachusetts: compatibility with the MSOffice productivity environment, and, the billions of binary documents in use by MSOffice bound workgroups and the business processes so important to them.
Gary Edwards

Quickoffice » Quickoffice Pro for Android - 0 views

www.quickoffice.com/quickoffice_pro_android

QuickOffice-Pro OOXML-files MSOffice-Integration florian-NOXML

shared by Gary Edwards on 29 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 29 Mar 11
     
    Good stuff.  Florian needs to see this!
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