Microsoft influencing partner NGOs to support OOXML in India
,----[ Quote ]
| Microsoft is encouraging its business partners to promote its Office Open XML
| specification (OOXML) to the Indian Bureau of Standards (BIS) and Ministry of
| IT. This move has incensed supporters of the rival OpenDocument Format (ODF)
| who fear that the "soft" Indian state may not be able to stand up to
| Microsoft pressure tactics.
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http://www.linux.com/feature/128528
The Carolino Effect
,----[ Quote ]
| Faithful representation of Microsoft Office 97-2008. I've learned it is
| rarely polite to ask a man what he means by "faithful", but let me make an
| exception here. We have now the binary Office format specifications, not part
| of the standard, but posted by Microsoft. And we have OOXML specification. In
| what way does the OOXML "represent faithfully" the "existing corpus" of
| legacy documents?
|
| Does OOXML tell you how to translate a binary document into OOXML? No. Does
| it tell you how to map the features of legacy documents in OOXML? No. Does it
| give an implementor any guidance whatsoever on how to "represent faithfully"
| legacy documents? No. So it is both odd and unsatisfactory that primary goal
| of the OOXML standard is so tenuously supported by its text.
|
| Now, certainly, someone using the binary formats specifications, and using
| the OOXML specification, could string them together and attempt a
| translation, but the results will not be consistent or satisfactory. It is
| the Carolino Effect. Knowing the two endpoints is not the same as knowing how
| to correctly map between them. A faithful mapping requires knowledge not only
| of the two vocabularies, but also the interactions.
`----
http://www.robweir.com/blog/2008/03/carolino-effect.html
OOXML: a 'standard' for document format /history/, not a document format.
Related:
Descriptions of Microsoft Office binary formats
,----[ Quote ]
| These formats being available now rather removes the “OOXML as documentation
| of Microsoft legacy formats” argument for the need for OOXML. Of course, they
| could have been made widely available before, but weren’t, for some reason.
|
| I utterly reject the need for OOXML as a standard because it is a description
| of the Microsoft Office 2007 formats. OOXML was released from ECMA within a
| month or so of Office 2007, so claiming any sort of “legacy” for Office 2007
| is ridiculous.
`----
http://www.sutor.com/newsite/blog-open/?p=2091
Existing corpus of binary documents.
,----[ Quote ]
| The "existing corpus of binary documents" is Ecma's stock solution to most of
| Malaysia's comments. Instead of cleaning things up, they give the impression
| that they are brushing things under the carpet and putting the burden of
| document fidelity on the shoulders of future developers instead of addressing
| it today. This is a fixable problem which can be handled by todays conversion
| software. Let's put an end to the propagation of 20 year old bugs once and
| for all.
`----
http://www.openmalaysiablog.com/2008/02/existing-corpus.html
Good Bye Interoperability with MacroButton
,----[ Quote ]
| The ECMA/Microsoft's answer is not providing anything to be sure your macro
| will be interpreted in the same way on all platforms (Windows, Linux, OSX,
| Plan9, VxWorks, etc…):
`----
http://www.noooxml.org/forum/t-41295/good-bye-interoperability-with-macrobutton
|
|
