Office applications Toolkit

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Story: Google: OOXML 'insufficient and unnecessary'

Posted by: Goldie Simmons (Sunday 2 March 2008, 6:39 PM)

ODF, The Big Picture

I don't think many in this discussion were cheering the virtues of OOXML as an ISO/IEC standard. One by my count, but I might of missed somebody. Many are familiar with Microsoft's checkered past and legal history. The problem is, as I see it, these types of arguments don't necessarily play well in certain situations, say when your government is asking for public comments on which type of format it should standardize on. It helps to understand the issue well enough where you don't use standard rhetoric which is easily refuted by the other side. For that reason I found the thread particularly illuminating.

Standards should be designed and maintained in an open cooperative effort for the greater good. You make a valid point in that ODF meets this criteria more so than MS-OOXML but let us not lose sight of the forest through the trees and turn a blind eye to problems with the ODF specification. I think Gary Edwards makes a good point that we should be listening more to smaller independent vendors. If the head developer of KDE's KOffice tells us that he can't exchange documents with OOo without risking loss of fidelity and/or content then it' s a serious fundamental problem. Standards should not be holding back the upstarts, they should be allowing our industry to boom. Think HTML.

One final thought and grab your socks because this one is scary. There's a reason Microsoft may not of objected to ISO standardization of the ODF format. As Gary again pointed out “Microsoft is grateful that once an unlimited undocumented eXtension loaded ODF opened the door at ISO/IEC, no one would know how to slam it shut”. So it may not be March 29, 2008, but they figure sooner or later they'll get their own format with their own undocumented extensions pushed through as an official standard. This allows them to legitimize a plan already in place via the Microsoft Office SDK for a conversion of OOXML to a “fixed/flow” document component as a direct replacement for XHTML, PDF and other technologies so dear to the heart of a free and open Internet .

Something to think about.
~Goldie

Gary Edward's article:
http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dghfk5w9_94fvpf9scv

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