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Is ODF the new RTF or the new .DOC? Can it be both? Do we need either? - O'Reilly Broadcast

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ODF HTML standard XML RTF doc Microsoft binary OpenOffice.org FOSS Sun IBM W3C dataloss Portable Document Format 2009 Office Open XML on 2009-07-29 and saved by 3 people
- Again, the centre requirement is the document packaging
  mechanism, enhanced to allow unpackaging and web service. The following
  diagram, though almost uselessly general, lists various components that are
  entirely common to both websites and XML-in-ZIP compound documents: why are we
  squabbling in such minute detail on solutions to XML-in-ZIP formats that do
  nothing to address this tectonic rift between documents and websites? Because
  we allow our expectations to be dictated by menu bars: something that currently
  has a Save As.. or Open menu item is real...
- Is ODF the new RTF or the new .DOC? Can it be both? Do we need either?
- 53 more annotations...
- - By Rick Jelliffe
    October 21, 2008
  - Jon Bosak
  - recently wrote an article concerning the position of ODF,
    Open XML and PDF
  - Jon's public writings are rare, well-considered and
    always of interest.
  - Jon
    has been exemplary
  - he has a side, he does not take
    sides
  - a potted history of the document format landscape over last 25 years
  - One Thousand Islands
    
    At the start of the 1990s, the document landscape looked a
    little like this:
    
    In the above diagram, each of the bubbles represents
    numerous formats
  - Consolidation
    
    By the mid 1990s, this had changed, in a period of massive
    consolidation as the web, Microsoft and Adobe starved rivals of oxygen
  - Standard Generalized Markup Language SGML consolidated many
    divergent capabilities of existing markup languages
  - One fairly unheralded aspect of this was the rise in the publishing
    community, including high-end vendors, of an awareness of the benefits of
    co-operation and standardization of different kinds. SGML was born out of such
    cooperation at ISO
  - Realignment
    
    By the end of the 1990s, there had been a realignment of the
    rationales for the formats: in particular, HTML had moved from the dumb end of
    town into having its own compelling rationale
  - Of these formats, Microsoft controlled .DOC, .RTF, and was
    actively involved at W3C in XML and HTML development. PDF was controlled by
    Adobe.
  - Digestion/Stagnation
    
    The early part of the 2000s was a period of extraordinary
    growth for applications of XML, matched by stagnation in the other areas.
  - to prevent HTML from taking
    market share
  - Microsoft adopted a policy of containment
  - notoriously with an unwillingness
    to support CSS thoroughly
  - either import or export to a foreign format, but not
    both
  - animation areas
    (e.g. Flash)
  - remain non-standard.
  - Standardization
    
    In the late noughties, a period of standardization broke
    through, with all the major formats being taken by their stakeholders through
    industry consortia and on to ISO.
  - The enormous controversy over the standardization of OOXML
    comes largely down to, in my opinion, two different views of the emerging
    landscape.
  - with an emphasis on graceful degradation
  - More support for richer XML media and specialist content types.
  - down the path
    towards the Bermuda triangle.
  - Carrots and sticks to entice and direct Microsoft
  - these are just for word processing
    
    Add Sticky Note
  - The Real Present and the Real Future
  - the looming
    challenge for document standards is
  - in integrating the packaged world of documents with the fragmented world of web
    resources.
    
    Add Sticky Note
  - Documents that can be websites.
  - Page description files with external
    resources.
  - Web applications that are single
    files and editable as applications by word processors
  - Arbitrarily nestable documents.
  - in this vision, Open
    Office or MS Word (or perhaps MS Powerpoint) should be able to open up and edit
  - or their successors.
    
    Add Sticky Note
  - a .WAR web archive file
  - almost uselessly general
    
    Add Sticky Note
  - not an outlandish vision: there is piecemeal
    support for many parts already
  - support plurality
  - We need to be able to have our cakes and eat them.
    
    Add Sticky Note
  - FOSS people often are concerned with pioneering individual efforts
  - I don't have high expectations of leadership from many other
    groups.
  - rather than collective efforts.
  - the large
    vendors or open source projects which straddle both documents and the web, such
    as Sun, IBM, and Microsoft, are still (I think) focussed on the dubious
    delights of business as usual and the Bermuda triangle
  - Towards Web-able Document Formats
    
    So what is there that we can do to nudge us in the direction
    of this large-scale interoperability?
  - Participate in the most congenial
    standards body to your interests,
  - encourage them to support plurality
    (modularity, alternatives, feature harmonization with each others standards,
    graceful degradation) and the dissolution of the great website/document divide.
  - foster good reasons (carrots and sticks) so that the large developers
    see value in this kind of enabling standard.
  - make browser
    plugins that locate resources in an unzipped XML-in-ZIP document delivered
    from a vanilla web server
  - enhance the existing XML-in-ZIP formats to cope with web
    formats (ODF and OOXML with CSS and SVG Tiny, for example) better
  - round-trip
  - lots to do —unblock
    the plumbing:
Doug Mahugh : Standards-Based Interoperability

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interop standard ODF Excel spreadsheet OpenFormula 2009 Office Open XML on 2009-07-28 and saved by 2 people
- Standards-Based Interoperability
- 05 June 09
- 47 more annotations...
- - Interoperability without Standards
  - First, let’s consider how software interoperability works when it is not standards-based.
    
    Consider the various ways that four applications can share data, as shown in the diagram to the right. There are six connections between these four applications, and each connection can be traversed in either direction, so there are 12 total types of interoperability involved.
  - As the number of applications increases, this complexity grows rapidly. Double the number of applications to 8 total, and there will be 56 types of interoperability between them:
  - All complex software has bugs, and some bugs can present significant challenges to interoperability. Let’s consider the case that 3 of the 4 applications have bugs that affect interoperability, as shown in the diagram to the right.
  - Here’s where those workarounds will need to be implemented:
    
    Note the complexity of this diagram.
  - In the real world, interoperability is almost never achieved in this way. Standards-based interoperability is much better approach for everyone involved,
  - whether that standard is an open one such as ODF (IS26300)
  - or a de-facto standard set by one popular implementation.
  - or Open XML (IS29500)
  - each application implements the published standard as written, and this provides a baseline for delivering interoperability.
  - The core premise of open standards-based interoperability is this:
  - the existence of a standard addresses many of the issues involved, and the other issues can be addressed
  - through standards maintenance, transparency of implementation details, and collaborative interoperability testing.
    
    Add Sticky Note
  - In the standards-based scenario, the standard itself is the central mechanism for enabling interoperability between implementations:
    
    This diagram is much simpler
  - How this all applies to Office 2007 SP2
    
    I covered last summer the set of guiding principles that we used to guide the work we did to support ODF in Office 2007 SP2.
  - applied in a specific order
  - I’d like to revisit the top two guiding principles
  - Guiding Principle #1: Adhere to the ODF 1.1 Standard
  - Guiding Principle #2: Be Predictable
  - Being predictable is also known as the principle of least astonishment.
  - What about Bugs and Deviations?
    
    Of course, the existence of a published standard doesn’t prevent interoperability bugs from occurring.
  - deviations from the requirements
  - different interpretations
  - Our approach to the transparency issue has been to document the details of our implementation through published implementer notes.
  - Interoperability Testing
    
    The final piece of the puzzle is hands-on testing
  - What else would you like to know about how Office approaches document format interoperability?
  - a standard (evolved and improved as reality demands) is the proper foundation for resolving interoperabilty
  - there is no question that users of other products are massively surprised by
  - (1) their spreadsheets having their formulas lost when interchanged with Excel 2007
  - (2) not being able to handle the formulase received in Excel 2007's ODF output.
  - I am creating my own fantasy about the state of affairs
    
    Add Sticky Note
  - it is far too early to declare it to be unsuccessful
  - I cannot fault the Microsoft approach as incorrect
  - I was at the year-ago DII meeting where the guiding principles were announced and their application to spreadsheet formulas described. I applauded the principles and understood the reasoning for formulas.
  - How this would impact various groups of users and non-users (who still want to interoperate) of Office 2007 did not surface in my consciousness.
  - there is NO published standard for ODF spreadsheet formulas yet.
  - Nor is there any de-facto standard that everyone agrees on.
  - the “spaghetti diagram" method, with all of the complexity and risk of bugs that entails
  - No implementer we know of has attempted that
  - In the case of spreadsheet formulas, help is on the way -- OpenFormula is under development for use with ODF 1.2.
  - I’d like to keep this thread on-topic
  - I appreciate the post, very good
  - Visually I would rather frame it in terms of convergence, a spiral.
  - I doubt someone would ever find a magic bullet to interoperability
  - and user satisfaction.
  - New Comments to this post are disabled
    
    Add Sticky Note
  - © 2009 Microsoft Corporation
ODF versus OOXML: Don't forget about HTML! — O'Reilly XML Blog

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ODF HTML Portable Document Format 2009 Office Open XML on 2009-07-28 and saved by 2 people
- Don't forget about HTML
- February 25, 2007
- 28 more annotations...
- - HTML’s potential and actual suitability for much document interchange
  - HTML is the format to consider first
  - validated, standards compliant XHTML in particular
  - HTML at one end (simple WP documents)
  - PDF at the other end (full page fidility but read-only)
  - HTML, ODF, OOXML, PDF
  - W3C versus ISO
  - overlap at all brings nothing but misery and bloat.
  - Lie adopts an extreme view towards overlap of standards:
  - The next dodgy detail is to make blanket comparisons between HTML and ODF/OOXML.
  - ODF and OOXML deal with many issues that HTML/CSS simply does not.
  - the W3C argument might be to say that every part should have a URL
  - a strange theory that MS wants ODF and OOXML to both fail
  - being pro-ODF does not mean you have have to be anti-OOXML
  - HTML is the format ｏｆ choice for interchange of simple documents
  - ODF will evolve to be the format of choice for more complicated documents
  - OOXML is the format of choice for full-fidelity dumps from MS Office
  - PDF is the format of choice for non-editable page-faithful documents
  - all have overlap
  - we need to to encourage a rich library of standard technologies,
  - widely deployed,
  - free,
  - awareness of when each is appropriate
  - unencumbered,
  - explicit,
  - using ISO Schematron
  - an adequate set of profiles and profile validators
  - Plurality
Compatibility Matters … The Lessons of Massachusetts

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lessons-of-massachusetts compatibility interoperability ODF MSOffice OpenOffice document-wars OpenOffice.org unread 2009 Office Open XML on 2009-07-16 and saved by 2 people
Martian Headsets - When the Problems with Standards Becomes the Standard Itself | Joel on Software

Joel takes on the difficult issues of standards and vendor specific implementations. This is a classic!

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ODF Browser-Wars document-wars HTML+ WebKit unread 2009 Office Open XML on 2009-07-03 and saved by 28 people
Breaking the Web: The Document War between HTML+ and OOXML

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html+ Microsoft Open-Web unread 2009 Office Open XML on 2009-06-26 and saved by 2 people
ODF and OOXML must converge!! AFNOR, the French Standards Body, announces proposals for revisable office document formats

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cdf interoperability iso odf officeopenxml ooxml opendocument standards 2009 Office Open XML on 2009-06-08 and saved by 2 people
A Deluge of Facts KOs OOXML (Office Open XML) | Fanatic Attack

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ODF Microsoft 2008 Office Open XML on 2008-10-21 and saved by 2 people
- Microsoft is still hiding the migration tables
- Those tables simply are not provided in the specifications, despite the stated goal that Microsoft is doing so openly.
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- 1 more annotations...
- - OOXML is custom fit for Microsoft’s products only
ODF/OOXML technical white paper

Interesting reading.

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odf ooxml 2008 Office Open XML on 2008-10-16 and saved by 4 people
ConsortiumInfo.org - Ecma Approves OOXML - What Does it All Mean?

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microsoft odf ooxml Office Open XML on 2006-12-12