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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

Home - Berkman Center for Internet & Society - 0 views

cyber.law.harvard.edu/...home

shared by Gary Edwards on 18 Dec 07 - Cached
  • There were 5 successive Roundtables.  Each roundtable was led by 5 short presentations before the topic was opened to the floor for general discussion.  The first roundtable focused on "What is ODF, and why are open document standards important". There were many questions regarding how open standards affect competition and innovation, whether ODF is in fact the best standard, issues of archiving and interoperability with ODF as well as how ODF addresses/will address concerns of accessibility for disabled persons. The second Roundtable discussed how various software developers were responding to ODF and the third roundtable focused on whether governments or non-governmental and consumer organizations should systematically use procurement policy to promote ODF.  The following roundtable was a lively discussion on whether national or global "agreements" can play a role in promoting ODF and how.  During that roundtable as well as the last one on "Reflections and next steps", there were discussions of future work and strategies on ODF in a new international forum, the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) to be held in Athens, Greece, October 30 - November 3, 2006.
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 18 Dec 07
       
      The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at the Harvard Law School held an Open Document Conference, October 23rd, 2006. Just a few weeks after the October 4th, 2006 resignation of Massachusetts CIO Louis Gutierrez. This is the summary report of organizer Manon Ress. Sam Hiser represented the OpenDocument Foundation. The ZERO Interop problems that plague ODF implementation were not discussed. Strangely :) Another point not discussed is the fact that ODF is not an Internet file format. It's a desktop office suite only format. This constraint is written into the ODF charter. Interestingly, one of the problems of making ODF Web ready is that of highjacked W3C standards. Highjacking occurs when a specification or application takes existing W3C standards and changes the namespace reference to it's own. This is what ODF does. The reason for doing this is to constrain and limit the W3C standard to just those aspects implemented by the ODF reference application, OpenOffice. XForms, SVG, SMiL, XHTML, RDF/XML and RDFa are problematic examples of W3C namespaces that have been highjacked by ODF to meet the specific implementation constraints of OpenOffice. This impacts developers who rely on standard libraires to do conversions and processing. The libraries are built to the proper W3C namespace, and unfortunately assume that ODF complies. It doesn't, So developers have to investigate how OpenOffic eimplements XForms and SVG, and build special ODF libraries before they can use ODF on the Web. It can be done, i think. But it's a train wreck of a mess guaranteed to destroy the high level of web interoperability users and developers expect.
Gary Edwards

office by thread - 0 views

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

archives oasis odf openoffice

shared by Gary Edwards on 25 Jan 08 - Cached
  • [Fwd: clarification: OpenDocument and SVG] From Lars Oppermann <Lars.Oppermann@Sun.COM> on 2 Feb 2005 10:31:44 -0000 Re: [office] [Fwd: clarification: OpenDocument and SVG] From Michael Brauer <Michael.Brauer@Sun.COM> on 2 Feb 2005 12:16:44 -0000 Message not available. Message not available. Message not available. Re: [office] [Fwd: clarification: OpenDocument and SVG] From Michael Brauer <Michael.Brauer@Sun.COM> on 3 Feb 2005 10:14:18 -0000 Message not available. Re: [office] [Fwd: clarification: OpenDocument and SVG] From Michael Brauer <Michael.Brauer@Sun.COM> on 3 Feb 2005 14:01:24 -0000 Propsal regarding the use of the SVG namespace in OpenDocument From Michael Brauer <Michael.Brauer@Sun.COM> on 3 Feb 2005 13:49:10 -0000 Use of SVG namespace From Patrick Durusau <Patrick.Durusau@sbl-site.org> on 7 Feb 2005 13:34:56 -0000
Graham Perrin

Orcmid's Lair: Microsoft ODF Interoperability Workshop - 0 views

orcmid.com/...-interoperability-workshop.asp

shared by Graham Perrin on 13 May 09 - Cached
  • 2008-08
  • Microsoft's first built-in support
  • approach to adding Open Document Format support directly into Office 2007
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • the balancing act that Office-ODF interoperability requires
  • absence of non-disclosure agreements
  • I saw no down side
  • all ODF TC members who desired to come had a place
  • interaction with the ODF community
  • priorities that apply in making trade-offs
  • five guiding principles that govern ODF support in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint
  • balancing of different interests: standards groups, corporations, institutions, government agencies, regulatory bodies, and general users
  • an application being quite friendly with its own ODF but not with that of other significant implementations
  • Balancing of competing considerations is not trivial
  • current OpenOffice.org implementations fail to check whether a formula conforms to its own extension
  • the central feature of typical document processing software is the internal, in-memory representation of the software's document model
  • features may be lost on output
  • features may be lost on input
  • rely on features that succeed with the internal representation
  • degraded or lost entirely in the chosen external representation
  • losing some of them when saving
  • Florian Reuter argued an interesting gracefully-failing extension technique that, on reflection, I believe could avoid breaking changes against earlier ODF specifications of namespaces, their elements and their attributes too
    • Graham Perrin
      Graham Perrin on 13 May 09
       
      I'd like to learn more about this.
  • a serious, open conversation is beginning
  • discussions did not arrive at conclusions
  • Graham Perrin on 13 May 09
     
    I read this more than a year after the event but still, it's interesting.
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