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Gary Edwards

OpenDocument Foundation abandons ODF - PC Advisor - 0 views

  • However, a recent blog posting by Sam Hiser, vice president and director of business affairs at the OpenDocument Foundation, outlines why the W3C's (World Wide Web Consortium's) CDF (Compound Document Format) is a more viable universal format than ODF.
Gary Edwards

Barr: What's up at the OpenDocument Foundation? - Linux.com - 0 views

  • The OpenDocument Foundation, founded five years ago by Gary Edwards, Sam Hiser, and Paul "Buck" Martin (marbux) with the express purpose of representing the OpenDocument format in the "open standards process," has reversed course. It now supports the W3C's Compound Document Format instead of its namesake ODF. Yet why this change of course has occurred is something of a mystery.
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    More bad information, accusations and smearing innuendo.  Wrong on the facts,  Emotionally spent on the conclussions.  But wow it's fun to see them with their panties in such a twist.

    The truth is that ODF is a far more "OPEN" standard than MS-OOXML could ever hope to be.  Sam's Open Standards arguments for the past five years remain as relevant today as when he first started makign them so many years ago.

    The thing is, the Open Standards requirements are quite different than the real world Implementation Requirements we tried to meet with ODF.

    The implementation requirements must deal with the reality of a world dominated by MSOffice.  The Open Standards arguments relate to a world as we wish it to be, but is not.

    It's been said by analyst advising real world CIO's that, "ODF is a fine open standards format for an alternative universe where MSOffice doesn't exist".

    If you live in that alternative universe, then ODF is the way to go.  Just download OpenOffice 2.3, and away you go.  Implementation is that easy.

    If however you live in this universe, and must deal with the impossibly difficult problem of converting existing MSOffice documents, applications and processes to ODF, then you're screwed. 

    All the grand Open Standards arguments Sam has made over the years will not change the facts of real world implmentation difficulities.

    The truth is that ODF was not designed to meet the real world implmentation requirements of compatibility with existing Microsoft documents (formats) and, interoperability with existing Microsoft Office applications.

    And then there are the problmes of ODF Interoperability with ODF applications.  At the base of this problem is the fact that compliance in ODF is optional.  ODF applications are allowed to routinely destroy metadata information needed (and placed into the markup) by other applications.<b
Gary Edwards

Open Document Foundation Dumps ODF for CDF - Open for Business - Lora Bentley - 0 views

  • Five years after it was formed specifically to promote OpenDocument Format as an alternative to Microsoft Office formats, those behind the Open Document Foundation are abandoning the OASIS- and ISO-approved document standard in favor of the World Wide Web Consortium’s Compound Document Format.
Gary Edwards

OpenDocument Foundation Slams Namesake Format And Calls For True Interoperability | Wir... - 0 views

  • There’s some weight to that accusation when you consider how the applications behind each format operate. For instance, Microsoft Office more or less sucks at handling ODF documents and OpenOffice sucks at opening OOXML files — but why? OpenOffice has largely refused to implement any of the proprietary elements of Microsoft’s Office and Microsoft has made only a passing effort at supporting ODF. The two sides may argue about which is the better file format, but in reality what they’re saying is “our software works better than yours.” From an end user point of view software remains the critical issue — far moreso than the document format itself. But the OpenDocument Foundation would like that to change, they believe that interoperability is the whole point of having a universal format.
  • But it is nice to see that at least some part of office document debate is actually on the real-world user’s side. After all, most of us really don’t care what format our documents are in as long as all our applications can open them. And right now that sort of cross-application compatibility is little more than a pipe dream.
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    Wow.  Add another name to the ODF Jihadist list of fatwah targets, "Scott Gilbertson".
Gary Edwards

OpenDocuemnt Foundation dumps ODF, choses W3C CDF instead- Google News Collection - 0 views

  • ODF group abandons file format in favor of W3C alternativeComputerworld,&nbsp;MA&nbsp;- Oct 30, 2007October 30, 2007 (IDG News Service) -- A group that was set up to promote the Open Document Format for Office Applications (ODF) is abandoning its support ...
Gary Edwards

Wrapping with foreign elements in Word 2007 and OpenOffice Writer - O'Reilly News - 0 views

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    Better late than never i guess.
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    Rick "Van Winkle" Jellife discovers the fatal interop flaw in the ODF "foriegn elements" implementation - The infamous compliance clause "Section 1.5". One question, where was Rick back in 2006 when the Massachusetts ODF pilot was on the rocks, and the OpenDocuemnt Foundation was claiming that there was no possible way to roundtrip documents between a da Vinci MSOffice ODF and OpenOffice ODF?
Gary Edwards

There is no end, but addition: Alex Brown's weblog - 20 May: a day of anniversaries - 0 views

  • Unlike ODF and OOXML, however, I am beginning to believe the Directives have got to a state where they cannot be redeemed by evolution and amendment. It may be time to start again from scratch.
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    Alex identifies the difficulties between ISO member nations and the officials at the ISO JTCS-34 responsible for MSOffice-OOXML and OpenOffice-ODF. The member nations really want MSOffice XML formats locked down at ISO. But they are short on both ideas and the authorization needed to make this work. Alex concludes that maybe it's time to start all over; from scratch. The Foundation developers working on the da Vinci plug-in for MSOffice concluded that it was far easier to target existing (X)HTML-CSS using the ePUB wrapper to get that higher level of interop everyone seeks. Waiting for ISO to sort things out is not a solution. But iunderstand Alex's position. Harmonizing ODF and OOXML is probably not possible. Leastways not without some major compromises at the applicaiton level by both OpenOffice and MSOffice. It would be far easier to demand that both OpenOffice and MSOffice support and implement the ePUB (X)HTML-CSS web ready format. The simple truth is that both OpenOffice-ODF and MSOffice-OOXML are application specfic XML formats suffering the same darkness: there is no standardization or sufficient documentation of the "presentation" - layout model. It is here that the highly portable CSS model is lightyears ahead of both.
Gary Edwards

Google's Microsoft Fight Starts With Smartphones | BNET Technology Blog | BNET - 0 views

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    .... "I recently described how Google's Wave, a collaboration tool based on the new HTML 5 standard, demonstrated the potential for Web applications to unglue Microsoft's hold on customers. My post quoted Gary Edwards, the former president of the Open Document Foundation, a first-hand witness to the failed attempt by Massachusetts to dump Microsoft and as experienced a hand at Microsoft-tilting as anyone I know......"
Gary Edwards

Slamming the door shut on MS OOXML - 0 views

  • So your goal is a networked world where metadata is routinely trashed by apps developed by those who are too dumb or otherwise disabled to preserve metadata and only the big boys get to do interoperability, right? So if I send you a document for your editing, I can't count on getting it back with xml:id attributes intact. No thanks, Patrick. That sounds way too much like how things have worked ever since office productivity software first came on the market. In your world, interoperability belongs only to those who can map features 1:1 with the most featureful apps. And that is precisely why OpenDocument never should have been approved as a standard. Your kind of interoperability makes ODF a de facto Sun Microsystems standard wearing the clothing of a de jure standard. Why not just standardize the whole world on Microsoft apps and be done with it? Are two monopolies maintained by an interoperability barrier between them better than one? Fortunately, we don't have to debate the issue because the Directives resolve the issue. You lose under the rules of the game.
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    Marbux on metadata and the language of universal interoperability: Few people are aware of the raging debate that has pushed ODF to the edge. The OASIS ODF TC is split between those who support Universal Interoperability, and those who insist on continuing with limited ODF interoperability.

    ODF (OpenDocument), formally known as Open Office XML, began it's standards life in the fall of 2002 when Sun submitted the OpenOffice file format to OASIS for consideration as a office suite XML fiel format standard. The work on ODF did not start off as a clean slate in that there were near 600 pages of application specific specification from day one of the standards work. The forces of universal interop have sought for years to separate ODF from the application specific features and implementation model of OpenOffice that began with those early specification volumes, and continues through the undue influence Sun continues to have over the ODF specification work.

    Many mistakenly believed that submission of ODF to ISO and subsequent approval as an international standard would provide an effective separation, putting ODF on the track of a truly universal file format.

    Marbux is one of those Universal Interop soldiers who has dug in his heels, cried to the heavens that enough is enough, and demanded the necessary changes to ODF interoperability language.

    This post he recently submitted to the OASIS ODF Metadata SC is a devastating rebuttal to the arguments of those who support the status quo of limited interoperability.

    In prior posts, marbux argues that ISO directives demand without compromise universal interoperability. This demand is also shared by the World Trade Organization directives regarding international trade laws and agreements. Here he brings those arguments together with the technical issues for achieving universal interop.

    It's a devastating argument.

Gary Edwards

Can a file be ODF and Open XML at the same time? (and HTML? and a Java servlet? and a P... - 0 views

  • The recent bomb in the ODF world from Gary Edward’s claims that Sun successfully blocked the addition of features to ODF that would be needed for full interchange with Office are explosive not only because they demonstrate how ODF was (properly, in my view) developed to cope with the particular features of the participants, not really as a universal format, but also because the prop up Microsoft’s position that Open XML is required because it exposes particular features that ISO ODF is not capable of exposing. Both because ODF is still in progress and because sometimes the features are simply incompatible in the details.
  • Actually, ODF is about to get a new manifest along with the new metadata stuff. Because we base that on RDF, the manifest will also be RDF-based. It gives us the extensibility we want to provide (extension developers, for example, can add extra metadata they may need), without having to worry about breaking compatibility. The primary addition we've made is a mechanism to bind a stable URI to in-document content node ids and files. This is conceptually not all that different than what I see in OPC; it's just that the unique IDs are in fact URIs. Among other things, in the RDF context that allows further statements to be bound to those URIs. Bruce D'Arcus | July 29, 2007 01:02 PM
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    What Bruce doesn't explain in this highlighted clip is that Sun decided to limit the "extra metadata" developer might need to just a handful of elements Sun and IBM needed to use in OpenOffice. The original OpenDocument Foundation metadata proposal was to open up the use of metadata to the extent that metadata could be used for all aspects of presentation (formatting AND layout!).
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    This vendor specific - application specific limiting ended the last hope we had for ODF interoperability and backwards compatibility with the billions of "in-process" MSOffice documents known to be populating business processes the world over. In fact, the problem ODF adoption faces is primarily that of MSOffice bound business processes, reflected in these billions of workgroup-workflow documents.
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    Proposal to have a standard packaging for combining application specific XML formats, Open HTML, and PDF. Great comments. This July 2007 article links to a January 2009 article: http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2009/01/packaging-formats-of-famous-ap.html
Gary Edwards

The End of ODF & OpenXML - Hello ODEF! - 0 views

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    Short slide deck of Barbara Held's February 28th, 2007 EU IDABC presentation. She introduces ODEF, the "Open Document Exchange Format" which is designed to replace both ODF and OpenOfficeXML. ComputerWorld recently ran a story about the end of ODF, as they covered the failure of six "legislative" initiatives designed to mandate ODF as the official file format. While the political treachery surrounding these initiatives is a story in and of itself, the larger story, the one that has world wide reverberations, wasn't mentioned. The larger ODF story is that ODF vendors are losing the political battles because they are unable to provide government CIO's with real world solutions. Here are three quotes from the California discussion that really say it all: "Interoperability isn't just a feature. It's the basic requirement for getting your XML file format and applications considered"..... "The challenge is that of migrating our existing documents and business processes to XML. The question is which XML? OpenDocument or OpenXML?" ....... "Under those conditions, is it even possible to implement OpenDocument?" ....... Bill Welty, CIO California Air Resource Board wondering if there was a way to support California legislative proposal AB-1668. This is hardly the first time the compatibility-interoperability issue has challenged ODf. Massachusetts spent a full year on a pilot study testing the top tier of ODF solutions: OpenOffice, StarOffice, Novell Office and IBM's WorkPlace (prototype). The results were a disaster for ODF. So much so that the 300 page pilot study report and accompanying comments wiki have never seen the light of day. In response to the disastrous pilot study, Massachusetts issued their now infamous RFi; a "request for information" about whether it's possible or not to write an ODF plugin for MSOffice applications. The OpenDocument Foundation responded to the RFi with our da Vinci plugin. The quick descriptio
Gary Edwards

Is Sun Friend or Foe? - 0 views

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    Published May 22, 2007, this comment was written in the aftermath of List Enhancement Proposal donnybrook at the ODF OASIS TC.

    It was at the height of our List Enhancement battle with Sun that OASIS stepped in their threat to boot the OpenDocument Foundation.  OASIS carried out that threat in May.  The lesson we learned is clear and unequivocal.  Opposition to Sun, in either the marketplace (da Vinci) or in the OASIS ODF TC, can be quite hazzardous to your health.

    Not that this comes as any surprise.  Nearly five years ago in 2002, when i first joined OASIS to work on OpenDocument, it was clear that OASIS was a big vendor consortia.  While OASIS does have an affordable "Lawn Jockey" program, Sun is clearly calling all the shots on the OASIS ODF TC.  This is why ODF is bound so tightly to the OpenOffice feature set.

    Still, we thought the "Lawn Jockey" loophole could be used to balance out the interests and control of the OASIS big vendors.  We were wrong.  And it took near five years for the obvious to finally sink.  Well, "sink in" thanks to the OASIS hammer and boot.

    ~ge~

Gary Edwards

2. WordprocessingML Reference Material - OOXML-Wiki - 0 views

  • It is desired to have improved interoperability between ODF and OOXML. However, OOXML lacks the following features:
  • It is desired to have improved interoperability between ODF and OOXML. However, OOXML lacks the following feature: image can be positioned absolutely within a frame Proposed change: Include support for this feature from ISO ODF in order to improve interoperability between the two formats.
    • Gary Edwards
       
      Include support for this feature in ISO ODF is another way of saying to hell with Ecma, OASIS and the big vendors driving the ODF-OOXML bus, Micrsoft and Sun. This is delicious beyond belief. It's also the only way the world is going to get the interoperability they are demanding. The big vendors must be neutralized. The file formats must be completely independent of applications, platforms and the control of big vendors who routinely make exclussionary interoperabilty deals with each other whenever and wherever profitable.
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    I promise that within a few minutes of reading this OOXML Wiki you will be wondering if this is in fact an ODF Wiki!  This is incredible.

    Fast forward to the section called, "Interoperability between ODF and OOXML", and enjoy.  They cite the problem and make an interop recommendation for each entry.  And what a recommendation it is.  Speaks volumes.

    There is definately something going on in Europe.  The EU IDABC has rejected ODF, OOXML, OASIS, Ecma and ISO!  And are now trying to write their own highly interoperable XML file format, ODEF.  an effort we will fully support with our da Vinci plugin for MSOffice. 

    Well, not only will we support ODEF, we'll write it for them if they really want to cut to the chase and get the kind of vendor independent interoperability the world hungers for.

    The British Standards Institute (BSi) is responsible for the massive research that went into this OOXML Wiki.  They have hunted down and defined the interoperability problem areas between ODF and OOXML.  Surprise surprise.  They be many. 

    The interesting part is that the BSi researchers have found massive, indeed overwhelming fault with OOXML!  Yet, instead of recommending that Ecma make the needed changes to OOXML, they instead recommend that ISO ODF make the changes!

    Not OASIS ODF!  Not Ecma OOXML.

    ISO ODf!

    The difference is all the difference in the world.  Sun does not control ISO ODF the way they control OASIS ODF.   And at ISO, all the binding of ODF to OpenOffice/StarOffice that accounts for the zero interoperability of ODF applications can be broken as needed.

    This is
Gary Edwards

File-Format Fistfight | Redmond Developer News - 0 views

  • Gary Edwards, president of the OpenDocument Foundation, flatly stated to me that any effort to "peel away the politics" in this debate was doomed to fail. Another very prominent member of the open source development community refused to comment on the record due to the sheer acrimony he's faced in this debate. And my newsletter articles, which have been generally critical of Microsoft's stance in this area, have drawn a significant amount of ire.
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    More great stuff from Michael Desmond
Gary Edwards

The X Factor: ODF, OOXML, CDF | Redmond Developer News - 0 views

  • XML expert, consultant and Microsoft MVP Don Demsak argues that both technologies share a fundamental flaw-they're not really striving to be standards at all. "I think this whole OOXML versus ODF thing is a non-issue. Both formats are just serialization formats for the object models they're associated with, and are not designed as impartial, interoperable formats," Demsak writes in an e-mail. Gary Edwards, president of the OpenDocument Foundation, which drives ODF development, believes codified document standards should not carry forward old flaws and application nuances. "The world is not a clean slate, but it's going to somehow make that transition of existing documents, applications and processes to XML," he says in an e-mail. "To us, that is an open XML file format consistent with the continuing work of the W3C that also meets the following criteria: open, unencumbered, universally interoperable, totally application-platform-vendor independent, with an acceptable citizen-driven governance," Edwards writes.
  • Being XML, it should be easy to convert between the two formats."
    • Gary Edwards
       
      UH, excuse me. ODF and OOXML might be XML, but they are both application specific XML. Converting between the two means somehow being able to reconcile the different application models for handling basic document sturctures such as lists, fields, tables, sections, and page dynamics. The problem is that the two file formats are irreconcilable on these issues. What's needed is a move towards a basic generic elements/attribute model able to layer these application specific nuances into a more flexible attibute descriptive. Or, we could just move to XML/RDF and never look back :)
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    Now you're talking!
Gary Edwards

Microsoft Will Support ODF! But Only If ISO Doesn't 'Restrict Choice Among Formats' - 0 views

  • By Marbux posted Jun 19, 2007 - 3:16 PM Asellus sez: "I will not say OOXML is easy to implement, but saying ODF is easier to implement just by looking at the ISO specification is a fallacy." I shouldn't respond to trolls, but I will this time. Asellus is simply wrong. Large hunks of Ecma 376 are simply undocumented. And what's more, absolutely no vendor has a featureful app that writes to that format. Not even Microsoft. There's a myth that Ecma 376 is the same as the Office Open XML used by Microsoft. It is not. I've spend a few hundred hours comparing the Ecma 376 specification (the version of OOXML being considered at ISO) to the information about the undocumented APIs used by MS Office 2007 that recently sprung loose in litigation. See http://www.groklaw.net/p...Rpt_Andrew_Schulman.pdf Each of those APIs *should* have corresponding metadata in the formats, but are not in the Ecma 376 specification.
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    Incredible comment by Marbux!  With one swipe he takes out both Ecma 376 and ODF. 

    Microsoft has written a letter claiming that they will support ODF in MSOffice, but only if ISO approves Ecma 376 as a second office suite XML file format standard.  ODF was approved by ISO nearly a year ago.

    Criticizing Ecma 376 is easy.  It was designed to meet the needs of  a proprietary application, MSOffice, and, to meet the needs of the emerging MS Vista Stack of applications that spans desktop to server to device to web platforms.  It's filled with MS platform dependencies that make it impossibly non interoperable with anything not fully compliant with Microsoft owned API's.

    Criticizing ODF however is another matter entirely.  Marbux points to the extremely poor ODF interoperability record.  If MOOXML (not Ecma 376 - since that is a read only file format) is tied to vendor-application specific MSOffice, then ODF is similarly tied to the many vendor versions of OpenOffice/StarOffice.

    The "many vendor" aspect of OpenOffice is somewhat of a scam.  The interoperability that ODF shares across Novell Office, StarOffice, IBM WorkPlace, Red Office, and NeoOffice is entirely based on the fact that these iterations of OpenOffice are based on a single code base controlled 100% by Sun.  Which is exactly the case with MSOffice.  With this important exception - MOOXML (not Ecma 376) is interoperable across the entire Vista Stack!

    The Vista Stack is comprised of Exchange/SharePoint, MS Live, MS Dynamics, MS SQL Server, MS Internet Server, MS Grove, MS Collaboration Server, and MS Active Directory.   Behind these applications sits a an important foundation of shared assets: MOOXML, Smart Documents, XAML and .NET 3.0.  All of which can be worked into third party, Stack dependent applications through the Visual Studio .NET IDE.

    Here are some thoughts i wou
Gary Edwards

Compound Document Formats Group Charter - 0 views

  • be widely implementable in browsers and authoring tools
Gary Edwards

South Africa, Netherlands and Korea striding toward ODF - 0 views

  • In Belgium, for instance, the government is using plug-ins to enable Microsoft Office to read and save files in ODF, Marcich said. The same plug-ins are being used in Massachusetts, which was the first governmental body to move to ODF. One prominent ODF backer, the unrelated Open Document Foundation, said in late October that it would stop backing ODF in favor of a more viable universal format called the Compound Document Format (CDF). Marcich said that "won't have any effect on the alliance or on ODF" adoption. Moreover, CDF, which is a World Wide Web Consortium format, differs greatly in features and goals than ODF. "We're talking about apples and oranges here," he said.
    • Gary Edwards
       
      This ComputerWorld article is referenced by the State of New York in their request for information
Gary Edwards

[office] The infamous list-override list enhancement proposal - 0 views

  • Well, I think the problem we face is that there are different interpretations of the 1.1 specification regarding the numbering of numbered paragraphs that have different list styles assigned. We therefore cannot say that the one or the other proposal is backward-compatible to the ODF 1.1 specification regarding the number or the style. We can only say whether it is backward-compatible to a certain _interpretation_ of the ODF 1.1 specification regarding the number or the style.
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