The ODF Alliance puckers up and gets smacked with the CSS question - Where is ... - The Diigo Meta page

• 06 Feb 08
  

  Gary Edwards

  <p>MS-OOXML supporter Rick Jellife discusses the ODF Alliance response to Ecma's proposed disposition of ISO NB comments on OOXML. The Allaince response has recieved quite a bit of ink, wtih waves of ODF jihadists pointing to it as incontroverible evidence that they are right. Rick provides a lengthy response, most of which presents the ODF jihadis with some difficult issues they must now explain.</p>
  
  <p>More importantly though, RJ uncovers one of the more glaring examples proving that ODF is application specific to the core, and bound to OpenOffice. He points out that OpenOffice ODF could have chosen the W3C's highly portable and infinitely interoeprable CSS as the ODF presentation layer. This would have been a great reuse of existing standards. But that's not what happened!</p>
  
  <p>Instead of the widely used CSS, OpenOffice chose an incredibly application specific presentation model with the unique innovation of <i>"automatic-styles"</i>. And with this choice came years of problematic zero interop as application after application try to exchange ODF documents with little success.</p>
  
  <p>Take for example KDE-KOffice. They've been a member of the OASIS ODF TC for near five years now, almost since the beginning. Yet it's impossible to exchange all but the most basic of documents with any of the OpenOffice derivaties (OpenOffice, StarOffice, Novell Office, and Lotus Symphony - OOo 1.1.4).</p>
  
  <p>If after five years of active particpation and cooperative efforts, KOffice is unable to exchange ODF docuemnts with OpenOffice, how is it that somehow Microsoft Office would be able to implement ODF without similar zero interop results? Isn't the purpose of standardized formats that end users of different applications could effectively exchange documents?</p>
  
  <p>The truth is that both ODF and OOXML are application specific formats. And you can't harmonize, merge, map, or translate between two application specific formats without also having harmonized the applications.</p>
  
  <p>Fear not though. It is possibl

  harmonization hypocrisy interop iso odf odf-alliance ooxml opendocument openxml

  • Harmonisation

     

    It is interesting that the ODF Alliance quotes Tim Bray that the world doesn’t need another way to express basic typesetting features. If it is so important, why didn’t ODF just adopt W3C CSS or ISO DSSSL conventions? Why did they adopt the odd automatic styles mechanism which no other standard uses? Now I think the ODF formating conventions are fine, and automatic styles are a good idea. But there is more than one way to make an omlette, and a good solution space is good for users.

     

    My perspective is that harmonisation (which will take multiple forms: modularity, pluralism, base sets, extensions, mappings, round-trippability, feature-matching, convergence of component vocabularies, etc, not just the simplistic common use of a common syntax) will be best achieved by continued user pressure, both on MS and the ODF side, within a forum where neither side can stymie the legitimate needs of other.

Would you like to comment?

Join Diigo for a free account, or sign in if you are already a member.