Gary Edwards
<p>The ever audacious and prevaricating lobbyist group known as the ODF Alliance has posted their critique of Ecma's (Microsoft's) proposed disposition of ISO comments rejecting OOXML. The critique's appeal to ignorance is breath-taking in scope. E.g., whilst slamming DIS-29500 on the subject of interoperability, the same document pushes for harmonization using the following argument:</p>
<p><i>"Harmonization starts from looking at where the two formats overlap – and there is a significant, perhaps 90 percent or more, area where OOXML and ODF do overlap – and expressing this functional overlap identically. This common functionality between ODF and OOXML would also include a common extensibility mechanism. The remaining 10 percent of the functionality, where these standards do not overlap, would represent the focus of the harmonization effort. That portion of it which represents a widespread need could be brought into the core of ODF. That remaining portion which only serves one vendor's needs, such as flags for deprecated legacy formatting options, could be represented using the common extensibility mechanism."</i></p>
<p>And precisely how do vendor-specific extensions aid interoperability, particularly when the proposed "harmonization" does not require profiles and an interoperability framework?</p>
brm odf odf-alliance ooxml opendocument openxml
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