Beyond the basics

re: Beyond the basics

-Scot — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 08:33:49 GMT

You have done what appears to be some thoughtful research on the issue, will you be sending this back to the ODF team ? This would have been valuable feedback during the development of ODF 1.0 and might still be.

The ODF team seems to be open to external input and I am sure they would at least pay attention to your input.

re: Beyond the basics

Albert — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 10:17:50 GMT

I also noticed this recent blog article that covers the same subject a bit more opinionated:

http://ooxmlhoaxes.blogspot.com/2007/02/ooxml-hoax-3-standard-requires-cloning.html

@Scot

I think the Ecma would have wished for some the input that was given to their final draft and the standardized version a in a bit earlier sstage as well earlier as well. Especially a lot of the minor or non-issues found by Groklaw that could have been dealt with with minor changes or a better explanation in the spec.

re: Beyond the basics

hAl — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 11:44:45 GMT

It seems that the OOXML spec might have suggested that these tags next to trying to emulate rendering can alternativly be used to inform a user that a converted document might be created using a application that used an alternative rendering for <fill in item description>.

That is a much easier to implement and will suffice for virtually all implementaions and converted documents.

re: Beyond the basics

Luc Bollen — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 17:28:37 GMT

It's nice to see how Microsoft changed since the time (no so long ago) when they did all they could to AVOID interoperability (remember Java, IE behaviour, ActiveX... ?).

Now Microsoft has become the champion of interoperabity, and decided to create OOXML because they were deceived by the poor interoperability offered by ODF.

Thank you, Microsoft.

Tout sur Open XML : le blog de Brian Jones

[XaMaLa] - Le poste de travail, un gisement de productivit — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 18:21:36 GMT

re: Beyond the basics

Ben Langhinrichs — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 19:25:00 GMT

Albert - I have seen almost nothing in the Groklaw work that was not commented about long before Ecma approved OOXML. The Groklaw team did a great job of pulling it all together and pointing out specifics, but there is little new that they found. What is frustrating (and you can see from old posts here and elsewhere) is that there seemed to be a resistance to "fixing" any of those issues raised, and there was much more emphasis on defending whatever had been done in OOXML, no matter howw indefensible.

BTW, I like the new direction Brian is taking with more positive posts. I think they are both more effective and more interesting than some of the earlier, slightly knee-jerk responses. This post, in particular, is well researched and presented. Even if one does not entirely agree with the premise, and I have mixed feelings about it, it is a much, much more effective post because it seeks to explain a way of thinking that is encapsulated in the specifications rather than just attack or defend.

Brian - Nice work!

- Ben

re: Beyond the basics

hAl — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 01:03:24 GMT

@Ben

How much comments did you see before the 1.4 final draft was released. Strangly the 1.3 draft (which was released to ISO in may 2006) or even the earlier versions was much less commented on.

Especially IBM seemed to have a 'small' team working on looking at possible issues in the specs and blogging about it (or Rob is really good). Simular to I guess Brian probalby has some people that researched this article

But those issues were mostly mentioned after the release of the final draft and I do think that the Office release was indeed a mayby to important date to strive for to make any more changes after that because it would have delayed the spec for a minimum of 6 months.

[Open XML] Tout est dans les specs !

Blog de Neodante (Julien Chable) — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 12:28:46 GMT

Dans la guerre des formats entre ODF et Open XML, il est dur de trouver de l'information fiable et surtout

re: Beyond the basics

hAl — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 17:41:29 GMT

I just noticed that Rob Weir has reacted to this post. He asks himself how an application can define it's own application defined settings that are not part of section 2.15 of the OOXML specs.

A good point.

I think he must have missed that in OOXML you can add custom tags simular to ODF office settings. However in OOXML custom tags require a custom schemaname. That at least provides a source for the custom tags and makes them unique.

The custum config items in ODF's office settings do not have a source so you cannot see what they do nor can you see which application added them to the ODF file nor are config items unique. application can create duplicate office settings names in ODF. This makes them inoperable by design.

It does leave a question for Brian why OOXML did not put the 2.15 section tags into it's custom tags together with adding a custom MS Office schema for the items ?

re: Beyond the basics

BrianJones — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 23:39:41 GMT

Unfortunately I haven't had the time lately to catch up on any of Rob Wier's posts. He seems to like have gone further and further into the theoretical arena, while I like to stay more practical. Otherwise it just becomes a huge waste of time. I have limited cycles in the day to focus on file formats, and I'd much rather spend that time discussing the goals behind real world scenarios. Let's look at those goals and then determine whether or not the technologies in question can meet them. We aren't philosophers; we're geeks who build software to solve people's problems…

In response to your question though, there are a number of ways in which applications can extend the schema, and they are all very well documented between parts 4 and 5 of the standard. The extensions are there not just for other folks implementing the standard, but also to allow future versions of the standard to stay compliant with version 1.0. That way we won't break any existing solutions when version 2.0 is released.

-Brian

Office 2007 ODF - UOF Support

Imagine Think Create Share — Tue, 22 May 2007 18:57:42 GMT

Hi, Maybe you have read about projects for supporting UOF . Similar approach to the ODF support. You

Questions on Open XML

Wouter van Vugt — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 14:43:57 GMT

For those of you not only reading my blog, but also the other content provided by the Info Support blog