I'm taking a few days off for the New Year celebration, and I hope you are too. The work will still be there next week, I'm sure. Meanwhile, here are a couple of links that Open XML developers may find interesting during this otherwise quiet week ...
Peking University recently released a program to convert between ODF and China's UOF format. This and the rapidly growing ODF Translator Project are enabling conversion between various formats that allows users to choose based on features without getting locked in to a particular approach.
UOF is an XML-based document format like Open XML and ODF, but based on the needs of Chinese users. For a good high-level overview of UOF from an interesting perspective, check out Rick Jelliffe's "Why China's UOF is good." Rick also makes some great points about how cultural differences affect participation in standard-setting organizations that I had never thought about before.
In other Open XML news this week, Julien Chable has started a series of posts about Open XML on his blog. If you can read French, here's the first one. Julien is an early adopter of Open XML who already has a lot of experience with the formats (from a Java perspective), so his view of some of the technical details will be interesting reading for those who aren't working in the VS/.NET/C# environment.
One of my New Year's resolutions for 2007 is to get serious about learning French, and my wife Megan and I have signed up for a French class at nearby Bellevue Community College. I'm hoping by the time Julien finishes his series I'll be able to understand what he's saying. :-)
Happy New Year, everyone!
Je ne vous présente plus le format Open XML , mais peut-être que le format UOF quant à lui ne vous dit