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Markup's Dirty Little Secret - O'Reilly XML Blog
So remember, there are three kinds of fidelity: fidelity because the document has all the information used by the producing and receiving applications, fidelity because the applications have the same resources available to them, and fidelity because the producing and receiving applications have the same algorithms and defaults. When looking at the various claims (Len Bullard mentions Spy versus Spy) made by MS on Open XML and” fidelity”, and ODF people on “interoperability” we need to interpret them in the hard light of the Dirty Little Secret.
Governments and procurement projects need to be quite clear that whenever they insist on page fidelity, they are probably in fact locking themselves into one vendor’s tools, in which case it becomes a debate on features, quality, price, training, etc. In a limited sense, everything *except* interchangeability.
Convert your PDFs to MS Word | The Download Blog
Excellent review of the many conversion services available, including a few open source projects. Conversions cover PDF to .doc, .rtf, odf, and ooxml.
MHTML / MIME HTML - Another Good Microsoft Creation
MHTML (MIME HTML) which allows all of webpages referenced resources to be downloaded and saved in a single file. This way you can avoid having the manageability problem of many loose files which many browsers produce when you save a web page. This is very useful for archiving webpages to file servers and local disk as well as emailing webpages to people....... An alternative to MHTML would be ZIP containers similar to ODF, OOXML, and XPS. Moving to standardized, containerized files will provide the same benefit of MIME HTML, allowing entire webpages and associated resources to be treated as a single file for better usability.
Can a file be ODF and Open XML at the same time? (and HTML? and a Java servlet? and a PDF archive?) - O'Reilly XML Blog
Proposal to have a standard packaging for combining application specific XML formats, Open HTML, and PDF. Great comments. This July 2007 article links to a January 2009 article: http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2009/01/packaging-formats-of-famous-ap.html
- What Bruce doesn't explain in this highlighted clip is that Sun decided to limit the "extra metadata" developer might need to just a handful of elements Sun and IBM needed to use in OpenOffice. The original OpenDocument Foundation metadata proposal was to open up the use of metadata to the extent that metadata could be used for all aspects of presentation (formatting AND layout!). - garyedwards on 2009-01-14
- This vendor specific - application specific limiting ended the last hope we had for ODF interoperability and backwards compatibility with the billions of "in-process" MSOffice documents known to be populating business processes the world over. In fact, the problem ODF adoption faces is primarily that of MSOffice bound business processes, reflected in these billions of workgroup-workflow documents. - garyedwards on 2009-01-14
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The recent bomb in the ODF world from Gary Edward’s claims that Sun successfully blocked the addition of features to ODF that would be needed for full interchange with Office are explosive not only because they demonstrate how ODF was (properly, in my view) developed to cope with the particular features of the participants, not really as a universal format, but also because the prop up Microsoft’s position that Open XML is required because it exposes particular features that ISO ODF is not capable of exposing. Both because ODF is still in progress and because sometimes the features are simply incompatible in the details.
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Actually, ODF is about to get a new manifest along with the new metadata stuff. Because we base that on RDF, the manifest will also be RDF-based. It gives us the extensibility we want to provide (extension developers, for example, can add extra metadata they may need), without having to worry about breaking compatibility. The primary addition we've made is a mechanism to bind a stable URI to in-document content node ids and files. This is conceptually not all that different than what I see in OPC; it's just that the unique IDs are in fact URIs. Among other things, in the RDF context that allows further statements to be bound to those URIs.
NYS Open Records Discussion Must Recognize Technical Requirements
While the workgroup failed to decide between “choice” (Microsoft's mantra) and “openness” (the ODF mantra), predictably punting this question to a new Electronic Records Committee, it did issue a number of interesting findings, the most important of which reads as follows:
In the office suite format debate, there currently is no compelling solution for the State’s openness needs. The State needs open standards and formats. Simultaneously, the State needs electronic records to be preserved in their original formats whenever possible. Many Request for Public Comments commenters, particularly in response to the e-discovery questions, stated preserving a record in the same format as it was created results in a more faithful record and diminishes the possibility of expensive e-discovery disputes. This is important to ensure future generations of New Yorkers can access the permanently valuable electronic records being created today. Moreover, State Archives emphasizes creating records in open formats makes it easier to preserve their essential characteristics and demonstrates they are authentic (i.e., they were created in the course of State government business and have not been altered without proper authorization).
I imagine that the workgroup must have found some level of solace in arriving at the one conclusion that all the experts seem to agree on: that electronic documents should be published using the same format in which they are created. If this principle held true for state documents, it would reduce the job of the new Electronic Records Committee to deciding between three alternatives: (1) require all state agencies to create and publish their documents in OOXML, (2) require all state agencies to create and publish their documents in ODF, or (3) allow each agency to decide which of these formats, OOXML or ODF, they will use in creating and publishing their documents. Unfortunately, this central assumption is incorrect, and adopting it as a basis for further deliberation will lead to a deeply defective
Office 2007 won't support ISO's OOXML - SD Times On The Web
Microsoft to support PDF, ODF 1.1 and ISO OOXML in MSOffice 14. The company will also join the OASIS ODF TC and working group for ISO PDF.
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In a surprise move, the company also announced that it intends to participate in the OASIS ODF working group and the corresponding ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 Subcommittee 34 working groups for ODF, as well as the ISO Technical Committee 171 working group for PDF, said Doug Mahugh, senior product manager for Microsoft Office.
He added that Microsoft would also introduce an API to allow developers to plug their own converters for formats, such as ODF, into Office to make it the default conversion path. ODF 1.1 was chosen over the ISO-standard ODF 1.0 as a practical decision based upon interoperability with existing implementations, Mahugh explained. -
Add Sticky Note“Customers that are expecting true document fidelity from XML-based, ISO-standard document formats will continue to be disappointed,” said Michael Silver, a Gartner Research vice president. Silver observed that the most compatible formats to use today are Microsoft’s legacy binaries, and he believes that Microsoft will be unlikely to convince customers to move to OOXML in the foreseeable future.
- The real work of ISO JTCS-34 is that of coming up with a standardized presentation model for OOXML and ODF. This is the only way they will ever get the interop fidelity end users expect from standardized formats. CSS and XSL:FO are primary candidates for building a highly portable "presentation" model. - on 2008-05-21
Flow Document Overview
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Uh OH! Look what Microsoft has put into the new .NET 3.0 SDK! Flow Documents is a Microsoft specific version of HTML that is part of the Windows Presentation Foundation Browser Developers Framework. XAML - XPS-XABL.
It also looks as though Microsoft has reserved MS-OOXML MSOffice level integration for themselves.
Another thought is that MSOffice is being positioned as a developers framework for Web 2.0 development. This docuemnt is goign to take some serious study. Bad news for IBM and Adobe for sure. PDF, Flash and AJAX are all going to be in the fight of their lives.
The conversion tools are going to become of critical importance. Some initial thoughts are that we could convert MSOffice documents to CDF+; convert OpenOffice documents to CDF+; and convert Flow Documents to CDF+, using the same XHTML 2.0 - CSS desktop profile (WICD Full). Converting MS-OOXML to Flow Documents however appears to be next to impossible by design. The easy approach would be to let the da Vinci plug-in perfect an internal conversion to either CDF+ or Flow.
It will be interesting to see if Microsoft provides a Flow plug-in for MSOffice. I doubt it, but perhaps there will be a demand from Flow developers. da Vinci could of course be configured to produce Flow Documents. At first glance, my assumption would be that the ability to convert native MSOffice documents and allication genrated Flow Documents to CDF+ would be the most important course to take. We''ll see. This is no doubt explosive stuff. Microsoft is truly challenging the W3C for the Web.
- garyedwards on 2007-12-17
Ripped Off by Rob Weir - Again
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Intriguing? Rob Weir knows full well that the Foundation proposed this exact same feature set as part of the da Vinci Plug-in design for Massachusetts, July of 2006!!!!!!!!!
The Complete Feature list of the da Vinci plug-in for MSOffice that was proposed and signed off on by CIO Louis Gutierrez in early August of 2006 was well known by IBM's representatives who were working hand in hand with us at the time: Rob Weir, Don Harbison and Doug Heintzman.
Louis Gutierrez had asked IBM and Oracle to create a "benefactors Group" to overcome the challenge that Massachusetts ITD did not have a budget. IBM and Oracle selected Google, Sun, Novell, Intel, and Nokia as key benefactors. The group was provided with the complete feature set and roadmap for da Vinci development.
The da Vinci roadmap was the schedule announced by Louis Gutierrez in his mid year report, August 17th, 2006.
The da Vinci plug-in feature set, in order of priority, consisted of:- ODF iX Approval at OASIS
- Plug-in for MS WORD
- Accessibility Interface for all ODF documents in MS Word
- PDF - ODF iX Digital Signature container
- Plug-in for MS Excel
- Interoperability Wizard for OpenOffice
- Plug-in for PowerPoint
- XForms Interface
The least Rob could do is credit the Foundation with what was then a very creative and innovative solution. Instead, a year later he's trash talking us and posturing as if he thought of this approach!
~ge~
- garyedwards on 2007-11-22
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An intriguing idea is whether we can have it both ways. Suppose you are in an ODF editor and you have a "Save for archiving..." option that would save your ODF document as normal, but also generate a PDF version of it and store it in the zip archive along with ODF's XML streams. Then digitally sign the archive along with a time stamp to make it tamper-proof. You would need to define some additional access conventions, but you could end up with a single document that could be loaded in an ODF editor (in read-only mode) to allow examination of the details of spreadsheet formulas, etc., as well as loaded in a PDF reader to show exactly how it was formated.
Inside PDF: CDF
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The real technical content of the CDF recommendations is in details of how to glue these various (XML markup) languages together once they all have been processed into their respective DOMs. It establishes conventions for how a script might reach across DOM boundaries, how events might get propagated across DOM boundaries and stuff like that. I won't go into this any deeper because you will get more accurate information by just reading the W3C documents. But the main idea of CDF is to bring these variously defined content types into a uniform "framework" so that scripts can operate more at a document level instead of being confined to their own document child.
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Bruce D'Arcus | July 29, 2007 01:02 PM