Office applications Toolkit

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Story: Google: OOXML 'insufficient and unnecessary'

Posted by: Marbux (Saturday 1 March 2008, 2:33 AM)

Not 1,500 extensions

I've already addressed this. The OpenDocument Foundation pulled it off with 5 new generic elements. And the reason OOo uses extensions is Sun's unwilingness to get the extensions it uses added to the ODF spec. It's been an ODF TC work item since 2005 with no action.

The barrier to interoperability is not technical. It is big vendor resistance to interoperability and maneuvering to gain a competitive advantage by manipulating file formats and seeking the ISO/IEC stamp of approval for their maneuvers.

As far as international standards go, both ODF and OOXML need to be thrown in the scrap heap and a fresh vendor neutral standard developed. W3C Compound Document Formats are the logical choice from a technical standpoint. Add a superset profile for the few remaining functions the big vendors just can't live without, and the world is off to a good start.

But rooting for either ODF or OOXML is just lobbying against interoperability. The world needs vendor-neutral formats, not winning application-specific formats.

Or maybe you don't believe that interoperability is fundamental to IT standards work? Here's what Microsoft standards attorney David Rudin has to say on the subject:

The ultimate purpose of a software standard is to enable interoperability between different products and services. If there is no need for interoperability, there is little if any need for a common standard. The point of a standard is to make it possible for devices and services from different providers to work together.

Do you disagree? If so, on what basis? And if you do agree, how do you propose as a practical matter to actually make interoperability happen if we have multiple incompatible standards that are each application-specific? Doesn't the logic you have employed imply that we will need even further XML standards designed for backward compatibility with, e.g., WordPerfect Office?

Backward compatibility is an important issue, but it is not unique to Microsoft's legacy formats. It is insufficient to argue in response that a standard with compatibility unique to Microsoft's binary formats is necessary because so many of the world's documents are stored in those binary formats. If we go by that criteria, many more documents are stored in HTML/CSS than in Microsoft Office binary formats, by many orders of magnitude.

So by that criteria, it is far more important that an international standard be backward compatible with HTML/CSS than it be backward compatible with Microsoft Office formats. And that criteria puts the W3C Compound Document formats as the standard more important than OOXML or ODF.

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

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