Office applications Toolkit

Story: Google: OOXML 'insufficient and unnecessary'

Posted by: Marbux (Friday 29 February 2008, 5:42 PM)

Then why does the same spreadsheet load faster in ODF?

Albert, the difference in conversion speed when loading or saving a file from to OOXML is negligible. Were that not true, the da Vinci plug-in for MS Excel could not load a million row ODF spreadsheet into IMBR faster than the same spreadheet rendered in OOXML.

Moreover, the Excel 2007 team created the binary XML Infoset Workbook format for very large spreadsheets, which is not part of the OOXML specification. If the OOXML terse markup is so great for speeding up export and import of files, why did Microsoft feel the need to do that?

The short story here is that you were taken in by a bit of Microsoft smoke and mirrors used to excuse not having the done the work to transform the terse markup into verbose, human legible markup in the XML tradition. I'm not in love with ODF, but at least the ODF TC did the work necessary to convert the original XML dump of the StarOffice binary format to verbose markup. The OOXML markup is terse because Microsoft didn't want to spend the development resources to make it human legible, not because it speeds processing of documents.

If society is ever to get to a rational decision on international standards, we need to stop repeating big vendor propaganda and deal with reality instead. OOXML sucks. ODF sucks. Where do we go from here?

-- Buck ("Marbux") Martin
Universal Interoperability Council

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