Office Open XML final draft!!!

re: Office Open XML final draft!!!

Wolfgang — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 21:16:35 GMT

any cance that there will be non-european and more worldwide approval of the standard?

re: Office Open XML final draft!!!

BrianJones — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 00:44:58 GMT

Is there a particular standards body you are thinking of Wolfgang?

re: Office Open XML final draft!!!

Chyld — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 04:54:41 GMT

Awesome! It's great to see Microsoft working on and advocating open standards, congratulations on all the hard work!

re: Office Open XML final draft!!!

D. Wang — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 06:10:46 GMT

Hi Brian, can you tell me why the Word2007 uses two formats - VML and WordprocessingDrawingML- to represent Drawings? Do you have any advice on it for a docx reader's design, And where can i find the documents on it?

re: Office Open XML final draft!!!

orcmid — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 08:22:32 GMT

Congratulations once again!

I wondered what was keeping you so quiet lately. Good work.

The downloads are going great while Europe snoozes and its late in North America. Whew.

re: Office Open XML final draft!!!

orcmid — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 09:11:28 GMT

Wow! I downloaded a couple of what I thought of as small files from the .docx list so I could have some samples to explore.

I wasn't expecting to see such a high degree of compression. You really manage to squeeze those document.xml parts until the zipper hurts. The only .docx that is larger than the corresponding .pdf is section 3, the primer, and that seems to be on account of all of the uncompressed (already compressed?) media parts.

I went back and got Part 4 in .docx just to be more impressed.

re: Office Open XML final draft!!!

John — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 22:10:53 GMT

Brian,

despite all the criticism I made here on this blog, thumbs up and thank you. First time in history Microsoft really opens its Office formats. One can only hope that you will stay on this path and won't make anything in the future that could compromise the positive effects of this step. It is now up to another manufacturers to make use of your format and make true interoperability.

Sincerely,

John

re: Office Open XML final draft!!!

BrianJones — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 23:00:12 GMT

John, Orcmid, and Chyld; thank you!

We'll definitely try to continue to build on this positive momentum and provide a ton of great tools for developers that want to build on top of the formats.

D. Wang;

Word was only able to do the work to upgrade to the new DrawingML framework for Charts; Smart Art; and Pictures. All other drawings still use the legacy VML architecture. That's why we needed to include both VML and DrawingML in the standard; otherwise folks wouldn't have been able to fully interop. The hope of course is to move to use DrawingML for everything in future versions, as Excel and PowerPoint did.

-Brian

re: Office Open XML final draft!!!

Stephane Rodriguez — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 13:13:54 GMT

"Word was only able to do the work to upgrade to the new DrawingML framework for Charts; Smart Art; and Pictures. All other drawings still use the legacy VML architecture. That's why we needed to include both VML and DrawingML in the standard; otherwise folks wouldn't have been able to fully interop. The hope of course is to move to use DrawingML for everything in future versions, as Excel and PowerPoint did."

Excel 2007 uses VML to represent comments and the containment layer around OLE objects.

re: Office Open XML final draft!!!

BrianJones — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 17:37:24 GMT

Stephane you're right, I forgot about that. That's another example where we would want to move towards DrawingML eventually, but weren't able to for Office 2007.

-Brian

re: Office Open XML final draft!!!

Stephane Rodriguez — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 20:46:54 GMT

The past incarnations of DrawingML have been chaotic. It would be interesting, out of curiosity, to get an accurate history of what changed over time, perhaps to better understand what is supported in what.

Here is my take, I am pretty sure I got at least 50% of it wrong :-)

- pre-Windows 95 era, Word, Excel and Powerpoint use their own vector drawing layer used to draw shapes, pictures, diagrams, art and charts. Powerpoint, acquired by Microsoft in 1987, has by far the advanced drawing layer (bi-linear gradients, opacity, ...), codenamed Escher (in reference of the famous mathematician).

- In Office 95, it is decided to reuse the Powerpoint vector graphics layer in Word and Excel. Migration begins.

- Migration ends with Office 97 where both Word, Excel and Powerpoint use the same vector graphics layer, publicly known as MSO (mso97.dll)

- In Office 2000, it's all craze about internet and Word tries to export WYSIWYG html. For that end, mark up extensions must be added to account for the MSO drawing layer. Hence the VML (Vector Markup language). Excel and Powerpoint don't support it. Internet Explorer natively supports VML (Internet Explorer's Direct animation vector drawing layer dismissed for performance reasons).

- In Office XP, VML migration ends and both Word, Excel and Powerpoint support VML whenever a document is saved as a "Single web page archive" (.mhtml extension).

- In Office 2003, nothing changes.

- In Office 12, MSO gets rewritten with backwards compatibility in mind. The vector drawing layer uses more sophisticated drawing functionalities which makes it easier to draw themed, 3D realistic objects. Technically, the differences are akin to the differences between GDI and GDI+. This new shared library is known as E2O and the corresponding mark up language is known as Drawing ML (Ecma TC45 specs).

- In Office 14, ??? perhaps the drawing layer is rewritten, again, to 1) use WPF 2) to allow plugins, hence enabling much more sophisticated do-it-yourself scenarios. Use cases : custom charts ; BI analysis tools.

Final draft of Office Open XML specification

OpenXML Developer — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 21:54:47 GMT

Trondheim, Norway, 09/28/06. At the latest meeting of the Ecma TC45 technical committee, the final draft...

Office Open XML diffing tool available

Brian Jones: Open XML Formats — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 02:29:12 GMT

I just saw this on Doug Mahugh's blog and it's really cool. Stephane Rodriguez has built a tool that

re: Office Open XML final draft!!!

D. Wang — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 09:22:44 GMT

Thanks Stephane's history story.

There must be a big reason for using two formats. But it's really a big defect for a file format, and a nightmare for a document reader/writer.

re: Office Open XML final draft!!!

hAl — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 15:24:50 GMT

Isn't the next step of the drawings format to move to XAML which will be the basis of the upcoming windows webdeveloper toolkit.

re: Office Open XML final draft!!!

D.Wang — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 18:20:31 GMT

XAML? no more changes please, Is really the users want? no! they don't care about it.

re: Office Open XML final draft!!!

BrianJones — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 18:45:28 GMT

No, we won't be moving from DrawingML to XAML. The use cases behind XAML are much different from those of DrawingML. You may see areas where we use VML eventually move to using DrawingML, but I don't see a move away from DrawingML for quite some time...

-Brian

Ecma Office OpenXML specification posted to Microsoft.com

Connecting People, Data and Diverse Systems — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 02:37:09 GMT

Finally I have posted the updated (and final) mirror of the Office Open XML format specification to the

Ecma Office Open XML added to the OSP

Connecting People, Data and Diverse Systems — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 01:54:27 GMT

Today we added Ecma Office Open XML final draft to the list of specifications covered by the OSP. Now

Ecma Office Open XML added to the OSP

SSiTE News — Sun, 29 Oct 2006 08:19:14 GMT

Today we added Ecma Office Open XML final draft to the list of specifications covered by the OSP. Now users who implement solutions based on the Open XML format can choose to use either the language of the Covenant Not to Sue (CNS) or the language provided

Open XML reaches final draft

Office Rocker! — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 12:41:10 GMT

To quote Brian Jones : As I already mentioned, in the last face to face meeting in Trondheim, Norway

Open XML Images: 3D effects

Doug Mahugh — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 23:07:26 GMT

One of the key benefits of the Open XML file formats is that they support all of the things you can do

Ecma Standard 376 – Office Open XML formats

Brian Jones: Open XML Formats — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 05:14:07 GMT

It's finally official. Today the Ecma General Assembly voted almost unanimously to approve the Office

Enighed om Office Open XML format!

Drejers Vue — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 23:51:00 GMT

Enighed om Office Open XML format!