Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
news:8298128.1pMDT2oGSE@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:
> __/ [ High Plains Thumper ] on Saturday 20 January 2007
> 09:50 \__
>
>> Mark Kent wrote:
>>> High Plains Thumper espoused:
>>>
>>>> There are issues with OOXML, with compatibility with
>>>> standards and inclusion of proprietary formats making it
>>>> vendors specific.
>>>>
>>>> Perhaps the best explanation is summarised in:
>>>>
>>>> http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/article.php?s
>>>> to ry=20070117145745854
>>>>
>>>> or http://tinyurl.com/2pkatq
>>>
>>> For reference, the average ITU standard is probably in
>>> the < 100 pages region, so a standard which is 1500 pages
>>> long is extraordinarily long from where I'm sitting.
>>> Erik's statement that it's *only* 1500 pages is one of
>>> the funniest things I've seen in years.
>>
>> What it tells me is that the standard is too unwieldy,
>> will be difficult to implement. Somehow me thinks that
>> most of it is encumbered with legaleese.
>>
>> A number of municipalities and countries have already
>> selected open standards, to avoid vendor lock-in. This
>> will have a tempering effect. Perhaps we may see the only
>> country to use OOXML as US.
>
> The number of countries and organisation that have chosen
> ODF is breathtaking (and growing by the day). Have a look
> at the OpenDocument Alliance Web site.
The good thing about ODF is it is vendor independent. This
gives any producer whether open or proprietary an even footing
to work from.
> Frantic acts to retain the 'monopoly enabler' are
> indication of what's happening. Even BECTA, which sleeps in
> the same bed as Microsft, has found OOXML unacceptable.
There are definite issues to OOXML:
http://soreeyes.org/
| Hiring Guillaume Portes
|
| Rob Weir?s How to hire Guillaume Portes is an excellent
| explanation of how self-serving Microsoft?s documentation
| of their Office Open XML file format is:
|
| It has been narrowly crafted to accommodate a single
| vendor?s applications. Its extreme length (over 6,000
| pages) stems from it having detailed every wart of MS
| Office in an inextensible, inflexible manner. This is
| not a specification; this is a DNA sequence.
|
| [Excerpts from the OOXML specification snipped]
|
| Not only must an interoperable OOXML application support
| Word 12?s style of spacing, but it must also support a
| different way of doing it in Word 95. And by the way,
| Microsoft is not going to tell you how it was done in
| Word 95, even though they are the only ones in a
| position to do so.
|
| [More OOXML specifications snipped]
|
| Again, in order to support OOXML fully, and provide
| support for all those legacy documents, we need to
| divine the behavior of exactly how Word 6.x
| ?inappropriately? placed footnotes. The ?Standard? is no
| help in telling us how to do this. In fact it recommends
| that we don?t even try. However, Microsoft continues to
| claim that the benefit of OOXML and the reason why it
| deserves ISO approval is that it is the only format that
| is 100% backwards compatible with the billions of legacy
| documents. But how can this be true if the specification
| merely enumerates compatibility attributes like this
| without defining them?
|
| Fascinating stuff.
--
HPT
|
|
