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Graham Perrin

Doug Mahugh : 1 + 2 = 1? - 0 views

blogs.msdn.com/...1-2-1.aspx

shared by Graham Perrin on 13 May 09 - Cached
  • five prioritized guiding principles for Office’s ODF implementation
  • When Will Office Support OpenFormula?
  • nobody knows yet when ODF 1.2 will be published as an OASIS or ISO standard
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • risk that the results might not be the same
  • Open XML / ODF Translator Add-Ins for Office can be used with Office 2007 SP2
  • Sun ODF Plugin
  • apparently works with SP2
Graham Perrin

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

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

shared by Graham Perrin on 12 May 09 - Cached
  • ODF in Word 2007 SP2
  • Service Pack 2 for Office 2007
  • You can make ODF the default
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • ODF can’t represent 100% of the things we can do in Word
  • differences between the default line-spacing
  • fixed-layout format for published documents
  • and a flow-oriented layout
  • work well for dynamic editing
  • flow-oriented format during document authoring and editing
  • ODF or Open XML
  • differences in Word and OpenOffice’s default styling for hyperlinks
  • longer in OpenOffice
  • text-wrap margins around the inserted image also differ
  • decided to not implement tracked changes
  • indents were incorrect
  • Office SP2 .docx to .odt is the best
  • OOo developers
  • further improvements planned/started for 3.2
  • version 3.1 will solve several problems
  • Update on ODF Spreadsheet Interoperability
  • spreadsheets that can be manipulated with MS Office ONLY
Gary Edwards

Suggested ODF1.2 items - 0 views

www.oasis-open.org/...msg00048.html

shared by Gary Edwards on 09 Jun 07 - Cached
  • Subject: Suggested ODF1.2 items From: "Florian Reuter" <freuter@novell.com> To: <office@lists.oasis-open.org> Date: Mon, 20 Nov 2006 17:03:24 +0100 Suggested enhancement for OpenDocument V1.2
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 09 Jun 07
       
      This message was submitted to the ODF-OOo/SO OASIS TC the day Florian joined Novell. His Novell contract allowed him to continue his work as the OpenDcoument Foundation's CTO. Take note of the response from Sun's Michael Brauer. It's a classic. The link is at the bottom of the page. ~ge~
  • Gary Edwards on 09 Jun 07
     
    Part of the sad but enduring "History of Failed ODF Interoperability Attempts".  This particular message is dated November 20th, 2006. 

    The OpenDocument Foundation was notified a week earlier that the "benefactor" ODF Community group Louis Gutierrez had asked IBM and Oracle to put together in Massachusetts had failed.  This was the group Louis formed around the da Vinci plugin and our InfoSet APi. 

    Florian has been hired by Novell, and his first day on the job he finds out about the IBM - Novell deal with Microsoft.  Now he has write the MOOXML plugin for OpenOffice using the MS-CleverAge Translator Project work.  So he writes this message to the ODF TC [office] list. 

    The interoperability enhancements Florian suggests are based on the <interoperability eXtensions> submitted in August to the ODF Metadata SC for consideration.

    The first element in this list tha tFlorian chose to tackle related to "Lists".  He called it the "LIst Override Proposal".  This became the now infamous "List Enhancement Proposal War" that resulted in Sun having OASIS boot out the Foundation.

    Such is life in big vendor ODF'dom

    ~ge~

Gary Edwards

State's move to open document formats still not a mass migration - 0 views

www.computerworld.com/...article.do

california iso lai massachusetts oasis odf officeopenxml ooxml opendocument openxml xml

shared by Gary Edwards on 09 Jun 07 - Cached
  • Only a tiny fraction of the PCs at Massachusetts government agencies are able to use the Open Document Format (ODF) for Office Applications, despite an initial deadline of this month for making sure that all state agencies could handle the file format.
  • Gary Edwards on 09 Jun 07
     
    Eric Lai keesp pokign at that Massachusetts hornets nest. One of these days he's going to crack it open, and it will be back to square one for the ODF Community.  Still missing from his research is the infoamous 300 page pilot study and accompanying web site where comments and professional observations document a year long study concernign the difficulties of implementing ODF solutions and making the migration.  <br><br>

    The study was focused on OpenOffice, StarOffice, Novell Office, and a IBM WorkPlace prototype.<br><br>

    The results of the year long pilot have never seen the public light of day.  But ComputerWorld is one of the media orgs that successfully filed a court action to invoke the freedom of information act in Massachusetts.  How come they can't find the Pilot Study?<br><br>

    At the end of the pilot study period, Massachusetts issued their infamous RFi; the request for information regarding the possiblity of a ODF plugin for MSOffice!  Meaning, the Pilot Study did not go well for the heroes of ODF - OpenOffice, StarOffice, Novell Office and WorkPlace.  Instead, Massachusetts sought an ODF plugin that would no doubt extend the life of MSOffice for years to come.  No rip out and replace here folks!<br><br>

    ~ge~
Gary Edwards

Harmonizing ODF and OOXML using NameSpaces | Tim Bray's Thought Experiment - 0 views

www.tbray.org/...Office-XML

bray florian-reuter namespaces odf ooxml opendocument openxml

shared by Gary Edwards on 09 Feb 08 - Cached
  • First, what if Microsoft really is doing the right thing? Second, how can we avoid having two incompatible file formats? [Update: There’s been a lot of reaction to this piece, and I addressed some of those points here.]
  • On the technology side, the two formats are really more alike than they are different. But, there are differences: O12X’s design center, Microsoft has said repeatedly, is capturing the exact semantics of the billions of existing Microsoft Office documents. ODF’s design center is general-purpose reusability, and leveraging existing standards like SVG and MathML and so on.
  • The capabilities of ODF and O12X are essentially identical for all this basic stuff. So why in the flaming hell does the world need two incompatible formats to express it? The answer, obviously, is, “it doesn’t”.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • The ideal outcome would be a common shared office-XML dialect for the basics—and it should be ODF (or a subset), since that’s been designed and debugged—then another extended vocabulary to support Microsoft features , whether they’re cool new whizzy features or mouldy old legacy features (XML Namespaces are designed to support exactly this kind of thing). That way, if you stayed with the basic stuff you’d never need to worry about software lock-in; the difference between portable and proprietary would be crystal-clear. And, for the basic stuff that everybody uses, there’d be only one set of tags. This outcome is technically feasible. Who could possibly be against it?
  • Gary Edwards on 09 Feb 08
     
    Tim Bray suggests using namespaces to brdige the comatibility gap between ODF and OOXML.
  • Gary Edwards on 09 Feb 08
     
    This log is connected to a recent post from Florian Reuter, XML Namespaces are designed to support exactly this kind of thing ...
Gary Edwards

Wizard of ODF: OASIS invited to join Microsoft in the DIN technical report - harmoniz... - 0 views

www.oasis-open.org/...msg00040.html

din eu harmonization iso oasis odf ooxml xml

shared by Gary Edwards on 29 Jan 08 - Cached
  • the WG is busy working on a first draft. This'll include mainly work in Wordprocessing. Spreadsheet and Presentation is still in the very early work. So help from the ODF TC would be great --- and a liaison would make sense IMHO. To give you an idea why help from the ÓDF TC would be needed I'll briefly outline some questions which arose: * Need for more use-cases, i.e. feasable interop scenarios * Discussions of unspecified behaviour (e.g numbering in 1.0, spreadsheet formulas, compatibilty options, etc.) and their impact on interop scenarios * Questions regaring generic settings like e.eg. form:control-implementation="ooo:com.sun.star.form.component.Form", or tweaking a la http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=51726. * Possible interop problems not handled by the specs (e.g. graphics, WMF, EMF, SVM, etc.) or e.g. font metrics and font embedding. As you see there are a lot of overlapping areas with eg. the "ODF interop" we dealt with in the workshop in Barcelona. [This issue is hosted in the Adoption TC, right? Maybe this TC is also suited as a liaison partner?]
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 29 Jan 08
       
      Uh Oh. Microsoft and Novell joined the EU's call to harmonize ODF and OOXML, but Sun and IBM refused the invite. Now we have the invite in front of the OASIS ODF TC!. Is there any rock big enough for them to hide under if they also refuse?
      And if the OASIS ODF does join the EU-DIN-ISO effort, where doe stha tleave IBM, Sun and their inistance on a politically mandated "rip out and replace" as the only acceptable solution?
Gary Edwards

OOXML: The next step - Interop at the International Standards legal level | Marbux - We... - 0 views

lists.opendocumentfellowship.com/...007359.html

interop iso odf ooxml wto

shared by Gary Edwards on 14 Apr 08 - Cached
  • Both ODF and OOXML are only one WTO Dispute Resolution Process complaint away from losing their international standard, national technical regulation, and government procurement specification status. They do not meet the minimum requirements of international law. Both are unnecessary obstacles to international trade; neither specify a uniform and substitutable product. That does not sound like a sound business plan to me. So I return to my question posed in an earlier post: Will ODF v. 1.2 under your leadership attempt to "clearly and unambiguously specify that conformance requirements essential to achieve the interoperability" and will the standards-based interoperability between *different* IT systems be "demonstrable," as required by JTC 1 Directives? That is not a complicated question and it requires no deep dive into international law to answer. International law requires what the quoted JTC 1 Directives require in this regard, but for purposes of the point under discussion we need go no further than the Directives' plain language. One either adheres to the rules or one forfeits the moral high ground to complain when others ignore the rules. Where does Rob Weir stand on complying with the rules?
  • Gary Edwards on 14 Apr 08
     
    Marbux at his best! Here he responds to Rob Weir's ODF v 1.2 arguments with a legal dissertation on International Standards, ISO, the WTO, and the key issue of interoperability and what it must mean. Excellent!
Gary Edwards

ODF Editor Says ODF Loses If OOXML Does | Slashdot - 0 views

tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl

durusau iso odf ooxml

shared by Gary Edwards on 27 Mar 08 - Cached
  • IMHO, the change in Patrick's position is entirely due to the realization that it is impossible to map between OOXML and ODF. I don't know this for sure, but when i read the German Standards Group (DIN) report on harmonization, authorized by the EU-IDABC and provided to ISO, i couldn't help but wonder how Patrick would react. The report definitively ends his OOXML ODF mapping dream.Many wonder why mapping is impossible. I had more than a few discussions with Patrick on this. His point was that a schema is a schema. As long as the syntax and semantics are fully documented, no problemo. My point is that both ODF and OOXML are application specific; and, both are woefully lacking in "semantic" documentation. Add to this problem that both ODF and OOXML lack an interoperability framework with any semblance of compliance teeth, and the whole mapping issue becomes an impossible solution. Especially if interop is the goal.
  • Gary Edwards on 27 Mar 08
     
    ge comments about Patrick Durusau and his surprising change of position in support of ISO approval of OOXML
Gary Edwards

Microsoft Suffers Latest Blow As NIST Bans Windows Vista - Technology News by Informati... - 0 views

www.informationweek.com/...showArticle.jhtml

iso microsoft odf ooxml xml

shared by Gary Edwards on 13 Mar 07 - Cached
  • In a new setback to Microsoft's public sector business, the influential National Institute of Standards and Technology has banned the software maker's Windows Vista operating system from its internal computing networks, according to an agency document obtained by InformationWeek.
  • Gary Edwards on 13 Mar 07
     
    Excuse me!  Excuse me!  Does the right hand know what the left hand is doing?

    NiST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, is authorized by the USA Department of Commerce. 

    Years ago, in conjunction with the Department of Defense (WWI), the Dept of Commerce joined with two manufacturing consortia to form ANSI.  Int eh aftemath of WWII and the formation of ISO/IEC, the US Congress, at the behest of the Department of Commerce, authorized the NiST subdiary.  NiST then authorized (and continues to oversee) ANSI to take on the USA representation at ISO/IEC.

    ANSI in turn authorized INCITS to take on the ISO/IEC document processing specific standardization issues.  It is INCiTS that represents the citizens on the ISO/IE SCT 1 workgroups (wk1) responsible for both ISO 26300 (OpenDocument - ODF) and Ecma 376 (MOOX).

    Okay, so now we have the technical staffers at NiST refusing to allow purchases of Vista, MSOffice 2007 and IE 7.0.  What's going on?  And why is this happenign near everywhere at this exact same moment in time?

    The answer is that this is clearly plan B. 

    Plan A was to force Microsoft to enable MSOffice native use of ODF.  The reasoning here is that governments could force Microsoft to implement ODF, the monopolist control over desktops would be broken, and the the threat of MS leveraging that monnopoly into servers, devices and Internet systems be averted.

    The key to this plan A was to mandate purchase requirements comply with Open Standards.  And not just any "Open Standards".  Microsoft had previously demonstrated how easy it was to use ECMA as rubber stamp for standards proposals that were anything but open.  This is why in August of 2004 the EU asked the OASIS ODF Technical Committee to submit ODF to ISO/IEC.  ISO had not yet been corrupted in the same way as the hapless money hungry ECMA.

    Plan A was going along
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 11 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?"
Paul Merrell

Rapid - Press Releases - EUROPA - 0 views

europa.eu/...pressReleasesAction.do

antitrust microsoft odf

shared by Paul Merrell on 22 May 08 - Cached
  • The European Commission has taken note of Microsoft's announcement on 21st May concerning supporting ODF in Office. The Commission would welcome any step that Microsoft took towards genuine interoperability, more consumer choice and less vendor lock-in. In its ongoing antitrust investigation concerning interoperability with Microsoft Office (see MEMO/08/19), the Commission will investigate whether the announced support of ODF (OpenDocument format) in Office leads to better interoperability and allows consumers to process and exchange their documents with the software product of their choice.
  • Paul Merrell on 22 May 08
     
    The European Commission has taken note of Microsoft's announcement on 21st May concerning supporting ODF in Office. The Commission would welcome any step that Microsoft took towards genuine interoperability, more consumer choice and less vendor lock-in. In its ongoing antitrust investigation concerning interoperability with Microsoft Office (see MEMO/08/19), the Commission will investigate whether the announced support of ODF (OpenDocument format) in Office leads to better interoperability and allows consumers to process and exchange their documents with the software product of their choice.
Gary Edwards

ConsortiumInfo.org - Standards to the People! (Updated Twice) - 0 views

www.consortiuminfo.org/...article.php

css iso odf ooxml xhtml

shared by Gary Edwards on 20 May 08 - Cached
  • I call on Ecma to withdraw OOXML from ISO and keep control of it themselves. We need it for legacy documents.
  • Gary Edwards on 20 May 08
     
    Strange demands from Andy Updegrove: "I call on Ecma to withdraw OOXML from ISO and keep control of it themselves. We need it for legacy documents...." Why would anyone want Ecma to take back control of MSOffice-OOXML from ISO? The best circumstance would be for OASIS to turn OpenOffice-ODF over to the same ISO JTC-S1, where they can finally begin the difficult (if not impossible) harmonization process. Let me add on other thing; the place for ISO to begin harmonization is "presentation". We desperately need a standardized presentation model useful to MSOffice-OOXML, OpenOffice-ODF, XHTML and HTML. I suggest they start with CSS 3, and work back into ODF - OOXML. But that's just me :)
Paul Merrell

BetaNews | Microsoft's Matusow and Mahugh on Office's move to open format support - 0 views

www.betanews.com/...2

compatibility mode mahugh matusow microsoft native file support apis odf

shared by Paul Merrell on 27 May 08 - Cached
  • DOUG MAHUGH, program manager for ISO 29500-based products, Microsoft: One thing to be very clear about here is this: When we say, "support for ODF in [Office] SP2," we intend to write very compliant ODF documents when you save a document. However, it's not a given that everything you can do in the Office UI is savable under ODF. As you're alluding to, there are things -- SmartArt, conditional formatting, things like that -- that we have in Office and that are popular features, where there is no way to save those in ODF, currently.The way we're approaching that, I can share a little bit with you: We're not throttling the UI, as you describe, where certain things are disabled. Rather, at the time you save, we're telling you, "Hey, you're saving in this other format; some information in this document may be lost." That sort of thing. And let me tell you why we made the decision to do it in that particular way: There are situations where some of that functionality may be very useful to the user, even though it can't be serialized out to the format that they're saving in.
    • Paul Merrell
      Paul Merrell on 27 May 08
       
      One might suppose that the new API discussed on the following page will similarly not allow developers to set a compatability mode in Office apps. Note that the existing APIs do allow that, so one might suspect that disabling the ability to set a compatibility mode is one of the reasons for the new API.
  • The engineering decisions that were made in the original creation of ODF represent the engineering pathway and the innovations that were happening in the OpenOffice space. The engineering decisions and development pathway for Open XML represents that which was happening in [Microsoft] Office, and the feature sets are not in parity. In fact, there's a superset of features within the Microsoft Office set, but there are certainly features that are exclusive to OpenOffice that do not get covered in Microsoft Office.
  • We really hope to see ODF move to JTC 1 / SC 34 maintenance
Paul Merrell

untitled - 0 views

www.dpawson.co.uk/...090612.html

ODF specificity quality testability

shared by Paul Merrell on 18 Jun 09 - Cached
  • Most (quality) specifications provide clear instructions using those magic words SHALL, SHALL NOT, and MAY where those words have a defined meaning for an implementor. Paragraphs are clearly identified as either normative or informative. That way an implementor knows what they must and may implement to claim conformance against a specification. This approach has been well established over time as a sensible way for spec writers and implementors to work
  • Most (quality) specifications provide clear instructions using those magic words SHALL, SHALL NOT, and MAY where those words have a defined meaning for an implementor. Paragraphs are clearly identified as either normative or informative. That way an implementor knows what they must and may implement to claim conformance against a specification. This approach has been well established over time as a sensible way for spec writers and implementors to work That is the way quality specifications are written. For example, ISO/IEC's JTC 1 Directives (link to PDF) requires that international standards designed for interoperability "specify clearly and unambiguously the conformity requirements that are essential to achieve the interoperability." With that clarity, conformance is testable and can provide confidence of interoperability. A suite of tests may be developed and applied to an implementation to determine which tests pass, which fail, and hence arrive at an objective pronouncement on conformance of an implementation against the entirety of the specification.
  • In a quality specification, it should be feasible to select a normative paragraph, identify a conformance test for it, and make a clear statement that this test proves that an implementation meets (or fails to meet) that requirement. Call it a test plan: define the tests (test specification), define the expected set of results, and define what constitutes a "pass" of each test that establishes conformance. The plan then provides the matrix of test spec against requirement. Simple.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Rob Weir of IBM chaired (apology for the misuse of that last word) the formation list and then simply announced what the charter would be rather than seeking consensus among the list participants. As part of this process before that charter was produced and while I still naively believed that consensus was a goal, I sat down with ODF 1.1 and did a paragraph-by-paragraph review for testability. The numbers were quite revealing. I completely reviewed only the first four major sections and found very few clear requirements. The majority were mere statements with no normative language used to identify what was required or optional. Implementors would have to make their own interpretation.
  • It's ironic that the chair viewed as good news the fact that there were far fewer testable paragraphs than he had predicted. But his prediction of 10,000 test cases is probably far closer to how many testable paragraphs there should be; my counts were actually bad news.
  • All of the above leads to the interesting question of just how the chair expects to accomplish much that is useful in regard to ODF conformance testing before the specification is amended to tighten up the language and add clear requirements. The syntax conformity is already handled by validation against the schema, but the semantics are woefully under-specified.
  • Summary: ODF 1.1 isn't verifiable as a specification. From a fairly cursory review of the latest draft, ODF 1.2 will follow the same path. With OASIS now being more demanding regarding conformance requirements on every specification and with ISO/IEC taking a closer interest in liaison with the ODF TC, I find it hard to see how the ODF TC co-chairs can maintain this view toward verification.
Gary Edwards

The better Office alternative: SoftMaker Office bests OpenOffice.org ( - Soft... - 1 views

news.idg.no/...art.cfm

shared by Gary Edwards on 30 Jun 09 - Cached
  • Frankly, from Microsoft's perspective, the danger may have been overstated. Though the free open source crowd talks a good fight, the truth is that they keep missing the real target. Instead of investing in new features that nobody will use, the team behind OpenOffice should take a page from the SoftMaker playbook and focus on interoperability first. Until OpenOffice works out its import/export filter issues, it'll never be taken seriously as a Microsoft alternative. More troubling (for Microsoft) is the challenge from the SoftMaker camp. These folks have gotten the file-format compatibility issue licked, and this gives them the freedom to focus on building out their product's already respectable feature set. I wouldn't be surprised if SoftMaker got gobbled up by a major enterprise player in the near, thus creating a viable third&nbsp;way for IT shops seeking to kick the Redmond habit.
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 30 Jun 09
       
      This quote is an excerpt from the article :)
  • Gary Edwards on 30 Jun 09
     
    Finally! Someone who gets it. For an office suite to be considered as an alternative to MSOffice, it must be designed with multiple levels of compatibility. It's not just that the "feature sets" that must be comparable. The guts of the suite must be compatible at both the file format level, and the environment level. Randall put's it this way; "It's the ecosystem stupid". The reason ODF failed in Massachusetts is that neither OpenOffice nor OpenOffice ODF are designed to be compatible with legacy and existing MSOffice applications, binary formats, and, the MSOffice productivity environment. Instead, OOo and OOo-ODF are designed to be competitively comparable. As an alternative to MSOffice, OpenOffice and OpenOffice ODF cannot fit into existing MSOffice workgroups and producitivity environments. Because it s was not designed to be compatible, OOo demands that the environment be replaced, rebuilt and re-engineered. Making OOo and OOo-ODF costly and disruptive to critical day-to-day business processes. The lesson of Massachusetts is simple; compatibility matters. Conversion of workgroup/workflow documents from the MSOffice productivity environment to OpenOffice ODF will break those documents at two levels: fidelity and embedded "ecosystem" logic. Fidelity is what most end-users point to since that's the aspect of the document conversion they can see. However, it's what they can't see that is the show stopper. The hidden side of workgroup/workflow documents is embedded logic that includes scripts, macros, formulas, OLE, data bindings, security settings, application specific settings, and productivity environment settings. Breaks these aspects of the document, and you stop important business processes bound to the MSOffice productivity environment. There is no such thing as an OpenOffice productivity environment designed to be a compatible alternative to the MSOffice productivity environment. Another lesson from Massach
Gary Edwards

OOXML in Norway: The haywire process | Geir Isene : Straight talk on IT - 0 views

blogs.freecode.no/isene

interoperability iso odf officeopenxml ooxml opendocument

shared by Gary Edwards on 28 Aug 07 - Cached
  • I had read the essay by Jon Bosak (SUN Microsystems) on why SUN voted as it did in the US. He lays out a very different strategy. His view is that the battle is lost to completely reject OOXML as an ISO standard. ISO can only reject it with comments, and that is equivalent to giving Microsoft a todo-list on how to fix the draft so as to get it approved. Microsoft has sufficient manpower to easily tackle that. Most of us had missed what Mr. Bosak saw: OOXML promises interoperability with earlier closed binary formats (the Word Doc, older Excel file formats etc.). But it doesn’t deliver. How on earth could someone be able to convert old binary files to the new format without having the specification of the old formats and a mapping to OOXML. If you are to translate some text from Chinese to English, it doesn’t much help to only know English.
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 28 Aug 07
       
      A "Yes with comments" is a yes for the ISO approval of MS-OOMXL. If ISO approves MS-OOXML, it won't matter what Bosak's "comments" strategy is. Microsoft and the Vista Stack will be off to the races. The full disclosure of the MS binary document secret blueprint won't matter much at that point.
  • “Ah c’mon Bosak, you are chickening out, we must stop this dead in the track”
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 28 Aug 07
       
      There you go Geir!

      Sun and Bosak have held the door open for MS-OOXML since 2002, when Sun blocked an effort to write the ODF Charter to include as a priority, "compatibility with existing file formats". This of course would include the billions of legacy MS binary documents.

      The thing is that those who work in the conversion-translation field will tell you that it is currently impossible to pipe converted legacy binary documents and OOXMl docs for that matter into ODF. Just as Microsoft claims, ODF in it's current state is insufficient and unable to handle the rich feature set of the MSOffice developers platform.

      The problem could of course be easily fixed by the inclusion in ODF of five structural generics. In the past year, there have been no less than five iX "interoperability enhancement" proposals submitted to the OASIS ODF TC for discussion and consideration. As uber universal interop expert Florian Reuter points out in his blog, these iX proposals did not fare so well.

      What Florian doesn't point out is that it was Sun who opposed any and all efforts to improve compatibility with existing Microsoft binary and OOXML documents. Just as they have done for nearly five years now.

      Sort of puts the Sun-Bosak support for ISO approval of MS-OOXML in a different light. ~ge~
  • Gary Edwards on 28 Aug 07
     
    see the sticky notes on this one
Gary Edwards

Re: [office-metadata] Suggested Changes on the Metadata proposal - 0 views

lists.oasis-open.org/...msg00065.html

conformance interoperability metadata odf-tc

shared by Gary Edwards on 23 Aug 07 - Cached
  • - A metadata aware ODF implementation *shall* not remove the xml:id attributes defined in sections [?] or change its values unless the removal or modification is the result of an edit operation caused be the user, or a similar action taken by some automatic processing of the document.
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 23 Aug 07
       
      The road to universal interoperability! Document exchange demands that applications preserve information that other applications need.
  • Gary Edwards on 23 Aug 07
     
    Surprising post from Sun's Michael Brauer supporting the mandatory "shall - must" preservation of the metadata XML:id. Preservation of metadata information is critical to the high fidelity "round trip" interoperable exchange of ODF documents.

    Marbux is currently locked into a raging interoperability battle with the ODF Metadata Sub Committee where it's been proposed that preservation of metadata be optional!

    The entire thread is located here:
    ODF-Metadata-Proposal-22August2007

    This is one worth watching. The fight to limit ODF interoperability continues. Marbux is a distinguished Universal Interoperability expert with a blazing background in International Trade Agreements and anti trust based on interoperability violations.
Gary Edwards

CXOtoday.com > Interview > "Computing driven by OXML sets to a strong start" - 0 views

www.cxotoday.com/...551-82889-906.html

odf odf-ix ooxml

shared by Gary Edwards on 23 Aug 07 - Cached
  • Why does Microsoft want another standard, what's the rationale? There are at least 4 good reasons why: *ODF started out and was completed as an XML format, specifically supporting OpenOffice with a tight scope around that product. *It wasn't until 2005 that the spec was offered up as a general XML office document format and consequently renamed to ODF. *No opportunity existed for Microsoft to actually participate in this full process - given the original scope, the 6 months between the re-naming of the spec to ODF, and its subsequent approval by OASIS as a standard. *The scope of the ODF spec never included even the basic requirements that Microsoft required to support a fully open format, and nor did the OASIS technical committee want to include these requirements.
  • Gary Edwards on 23 Aug 07
     
    Erwin's StarOffice Tango has an exhaustive response to this Microsoft Q&A. Correcting false statements by Microsoft
Gary Edwards

Griffin Brown Weblog - ODF validation for the cognoscenti - 0 views

www.griffinbrown.co.uk/...PermaLink.aspx

brown iso jtc-sc34 odf ooxml weir

shared by Gary Edwards on 06 May 08 - Cached
  • ODF validation for the cognoscenti Just when it seemed like nobody was interested in the ODF conformance smoke test posted a few days ago, IBM's Rob Weir weighs in with a lengthy piece in response.
  • Gary Edwards on 06 May 08
     
    Rob Weir gets royally spanked. And so does the notion that ODF is somehow "interoperable". Big Time.
Gary Edwards

Open Stack: ISO Does The Unthinkable. How ISO approval of MSOffice-OOXML will break th... - 0 views

openstack.blogspot.com/...ment-as-perfect-microsoft.html

css davinci interoperability msoffice odf ooxml xaml xhtml

shared by Gary Edwards on 22 Apr 08 - Cached
  • In August of 2007 we dropped ODF as the da Vinci target conversion format, and moved to the W3C's Compound Document Format (CDF) with an ePUB wrapper.The reason for this move is that we could not establish a reasonable degree of interoperability with OpenOffice ODF unless Sun supported the five generic eXtensions to ODF needed to hit the high fidelity conversion the da Vinci process is capable of.Since da Vinci is a clone of the MSOffice OOXML compatibility Kit, we use the same internal conversion process where imbr (in-memory-binary-representation) is converted to another format: imbr &lt;&gt; OOXML or, imbr &lt;&gt; RTF.While it's entirely compliant to eXtend ODF, without Sun's changes to OpenOffice ODF the application-platform-vendor independent interoperability end users expect would be meaningless.The problem as we see it is this; it is impossible to do a high fidelity conversion between two application specific XML formats. It is however quite possible to do a conversion between an application specific format and a generic (application-platform-vendor independent) format.
  • Gary Edwards on 22 Apr 08
     
    A summary of my views on ISO approval of MSOffice-OOXML and the impact it will have on the futrue of the open web.
  • Gary Edwards on 22 Apr 08
     
    In response to a recent question posted to a rather old OpenStack blog, i posted this summary of my views on ISO approval of MSOffice-OOXML and the impact it will have on the futrue of the open web.
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