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.”
Great quote from Eric Knorr. He hits the nail on the head here, pointing out the problem Office 2.0 Web Apps and SaaS apps face: If these Web wonders have interoperability and high fidelity document exchange with MSOffice, their collaborative features are value added wonders for existing business processes and workgroup-workflow scenarios. If, on the other hand they lack this level of interop - integration with MSOffice documents and processes, the value add becomes a problematic split in a business process. The only way to overcome that kind of a split is to take the entire process. Which is difficult for lightweight mashup happy web wonders to do.
