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Gary Edwards

Tim Anderson's ITWriting - Tech writing blog » Microsoft's Jean Paoli on the ... - 0 views

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microsoft mooxml odf paoli

shared by Gary Edwards on 24 Apr 07 - Cached
  • What’s distinctive about the goals of OOXML? Primarily, to have full fidelity with pre-existing binary documents created in Microsoft Office. “What people want is to make sure that their billions of important documents can be saved in a format where they don’t lose any information. As a design goal, we said that those formats have to represent all the information that enables high-fidelity migration from the binary formats”, says Paoli. He mentions work with institutions including the British Library and the US Library of Congress, concerned to preserve the information in their electronic archive. I asked Paoli if such users could get equally good fidelity by converting their documents to ODF. “Absolutely not,” he says. “I am very clear on that. Those two formats are done for different reasons.” What can go wrong? Paoli gives as an example the myriad ways borders can be drawn round tables in Microsoft Office and all its legacy versions. “There are 100 ways to draw the lines around a table,” he says. “The Open XML format has them all, but ODF which has not been designed for backward compatibility, does not have them. It’s really the tip of the iceberg. So if someone translates a binary document with a table to ODF, you will lose the framing details. That is just a very small example.”
  • “Open Document Format and Office Open XML have very different goals”, says Paoli, responding to the claim that the world needs only one standard XML format for office documents. “Both of them are formats for documents … both are good.”
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 19 Aug 07
       
      The door should have been slammed shut on OOXML near five years ago when, on December 14th, 2006, at the very first OASIS ODF TC meeting, Stellent's Phil Boutros proposed that the charter include, "compatibility with existing file formats and interoperability with existing applications" as a priority objective.
  • Another benefit Paoli claims for OOXML is performance. “A lot of things are designed differently because we believe it will work faster. The spreadsheet format has been designed for very big spreadsheets because we know our users, especially in the finance industry, use very large spreadsheets.
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 19 Aug 07
       
      Wrong. The da Vinci plug-in prototype we demonstrated to Massachusetts on June 19th, 2006 proved that there is little or no difference in spreadsheet performance between a OOXML file, and an ODF file.

      In fact, ODF version of the extremely large test file beat the OOXML load by 12 seconds.

      Where the performance difference comes in is at the application level. MS Excel can load a OOXML version of a large spreadsheet faster than OpenOffice can load an ODF version of that same spreadsheet.

      If you eliminate the application differential, and load the OOXML file and the ODF version of that same spreadsheet into a plug-in enabled Excel, the performance differences are negligible.

      The reason for this is that the OOXML plug-in for Excel has a conversion overhead identical to the da Vinci plug-in for Excel. It has nothing to do with the file format, and everythign to do with the application.

      ~ge~
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Paoli points to the conversion errors as evidence of how poorly ODF can represent legacy Office documents. My hunch is that this has more to do with the poor quality of the converter.
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 19 Aug 07
       
      Note that these OASIS ODF TC November 20th iX "interoperability enhancement" suggestions were submitted by Novell as part of their effort to perfect a OOXML plug-in for OpenOffice!!!!

      "Lists" were th first of these iX items to be submitted as formal proposal. And Sun fought that list proposal viciously for the next four months. The donnybrook resulted i a total breakdown of the ODF consensus process. But, it ensured that never again would anyone be stupid enough to challenge Sun's authority and control of the OASIS ODF TC.

      Sun made it clear that they would viciously oppose any other efforts to establish interoperability with existing Microsoft documents, applications, processes effort.

      Point taken.

      ~ge~
  • the idea that Sun is preparing a reference implementation of OOXML is laughable.
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 19 Aug 07
       
      Sorry Tim. It's true. Sun and Novell are working together to develop native OOXML file support in OpenOffice. You can find this clearly stated in the Gullfoss Planet OpenOffice blogs.

      The funny thing is that Sun will have to implement and support the November 20th iX enhancements submitted by Novell!! (Or, the interoperability frameworks also submitted by Novell in February of 2007). There is simply no other way for OpenOffice to implement OOXML with the needed fidelity.

      ~ge~
  • One of new scenarios enabled by the “custom xml parts” (again, if you read their blogs, you must have heard of this stuff) is the ability to bind xml sources and a control+layout so that it enables the equivalent of data queries (we’ve had in Excel for many years already), just with a source which is part of the package, contrary to the typical external data source connection. Well this stuff, besides the declaration (which includes, big surprise, GUIDs and stuff like that) requires the actual Office 2007 run-time to work. So whenever MS says this stuff is interoperable, they cannot mean you can take this stuff away in another application. Because you can’t. This binding is more or less the same than the embedding of VBA macros. It’s all application-specific, and only Microsoft’s own suite knows how to instantiate this stuff.
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 19 Aug 07
       
      Stephan whacks this one out of the park! Smart Documents will replace VBa scripts, macros and OLE functionality going forward. It's also the data binding - workflow and metadata model of the future. And it's all proprietary!

      It's the combination of OOXML plus the MSOffice- Vista Stack specific Smart Documents that will lock end users into the Vista Stack for years to come.

      Watch out Google!

      ~ge~
  • Has Microsoft published the .doc spec publicly? Then why should ODF worry about the past? It’s not ODF’s concern to worry about Microsoft’s past formats. (Understand that the .doc format alone changed six times in the last eight versions of Office!) That’s Microsoft’s legacy problem, not ODF’s.
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 19 Aug 07
       
      There really is no need to access the secret binary blueprints. The ACME 376 plug-in demonstration proves this conclusively. The only thing the ACME 376 demo lacks is that we didn't throw the switch on the magic key to release all VBa scripts, macros and OLE bindings to ACME. But that can be done if someone is serious about converting the whole shebang of documents, applications and processes.

      The real problem is that although ACME 376 proves we can hit the high fidelity required, it is impossible to effectively capture that fidelity in ODF without the iX interoperability enhancements. The world expects ODF interoperability. But as long as Sun opposes iX, we can't pipe from ACME 376 to ODF.

      ~ge~
  • I put it to Paoli that OOXML is hard to implement because of all its legacy support, some of which is currently not well documented. “I don’t believe that at all. It’s actually the opposite,” he says. He make the point that third parties like Corel, which have previously implemented support for binary formats like .doc and .xls, should find it easy to transition to OOXML. “We believe Open XML adoption by vendors like Corel will be very easy because they have already been doing 90% of the work, doing the binary formats. The features are already there.”
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 20 Aug 07
       
      WordPerfect does an excellent import of MSWord .doc documents. But there is no conversion! It's a read only rendering. Once you start editing the document in WP, all kinds of funny things happen, and the perfect fidelity melts away like the wicked witch of west in a bucket full of water.
  • Gary Edwards on 24 Apr 07
     
    Tim Anderson interviews Microsoft's Jean Paoli about MOOXML and ODF.    Jean Paoli of course has the predictable set of answers.  But Tim anderson provides us with some interesting insights and comments of his own.  There is also a gem of a comment from Stephane Rodriquez, the reknown spreadsheet expert.

    The bottom line for Microsoft has not changed.  MOOXML exists because of the need for an XML file format compatible with the legacy of existing MSOffic ebinary documents.  He claims that ODF is not compatible, and offers the "page borders" issue as an example.

    Page borders?  What's that got to do with the ODF file format?   These are application specific, application bound proprietary graphics that can not be ported to any other application - like OpenOffice.  The reason has nothign whatsoever to do with ODF and everything to do with the fact that the page border library is bound to MSOffice and not available to other applications like OpenOffice. 

    So here is an application specific feature tha tJean Paoli claims can not be expressed in ODF, but can in MOOXML.  But when are running the da Vinci ODF plugin in MSWord, there is no problem whatsoever in capturing the page borders in ODF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  No problem!!!!!!!!!!

    The problem is opening up that same da Vinci MSWord document in OpenOffice.  That's where the page borders are dropped.  The issue is based entirely on the fact that OpenOffice is unable to render these MSWord specific graphics bound to an MSOffice only library.

    If however we take that same page border loaded da Vinci MSWord document, and send it half way across the world to another MSWord desktop running da Vinci, the da Vinci plugin easily loads the ODF document into MSWord where it is perfectly rendered, page borders and all!!!!!!!!

    Now i will admit that this is one very difficult issue to understand.  If not f
  • Gary Edwards on 20 Aug 07
     
    Great interview. Tim can obviously run circles around poor Jean Paoli.
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