Office applications Toolkit

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Story: Google: OOXML 'insufficient and unnecessary'

Posted by: garyedwards (Thursday 13 March 2008, 6:01 PM)

Breaking the Web

Hi Karen,

Thanks for the heads up. I did have a chance to comment further on the SDK in John Resig's blog; Unbreaking the Web. The issue was IE 8 passing the ACID 2 test, demonstrating surprising Microsoft compliance with W3C Web Standards. My position is that nothing can be further from the truth.

A few days ago in the Guardian i caught an interesting exchange involving Dean Hachamovitch, Microsoft's general manager for IE, speaking at the Mix08 keynote. The article was titled, IE aims to embrace the web again:

Hachamovitch was trying to explain why they finally brought IE into compliance with the ACID 2 test, and, why it took so long. "It comes down to what we were doing with our time," he said. "Between 2001 and 2003 we were building what you experience now as Windows Presentation Foundation and Silverlight."

The author of the article, Tim Anderson, then goes on to explain that, "These technologies display not HTML, the language of web pages, but XAML, Microsoft's proprietary code for creating rich visual content."

The MSOffice SDK provides a component for the easy conversion of OOXML XAML. XAML is also refered to in the SDK as fixed/flow. The recent announcement of a Silverlight browser plug-in / run time extension able to fully display OOXML documents is based on the SDK converter.

This puts IE 8 in an interesting position. It is the only browser capable of displaying advanced W3C HTML-5 + CSS 2.1 web documents, and, proprietary OOXMLXAML documents.

Interestingly, IE-8 does not support the XHTML mime type! Nor does it support JavaScript (otherwise known as EcmaScript). While arguments can be made that IE-8 supports lightweight transitional XHTML, it clearly doesn't support, or plan to support, highly structured XHTML + CSS+JavaScript. This is important because it is possible to capture in W3C CDF (XHTML + CSS) and convert the full richness and feature sweep of MSOffice OOXML.

The point where Microsoft has chosen to break the web is with highly structured XHTML + CSS documents. They are replacing W3C Standards with the proprietary XAML, reserving the transition to the web of billions of MSOffice business processes and documents for themselves. Think of it this way; the wealth of business processes bound to MSOffice workgroups is going to make that transition to the web, but not to an open web. The web we're talking about here is the MS Cloud, where high volume applications like MSOffice, Exchange, SharePoint, MS SQL Server and Windows Server speak through proprietary protocols and components such as XAML and the .NET libraries. IE-8 simply allows MS Cloud users to navigate the rest of the web.

If Microsoft can somehow wrangle ISO approval of OOXML, they can hide the fact that XAML and the entire information flow within the MS Cloud is proprietary. With ISO approval, the OOXML XAML converter becomes a web killer.

~ge~

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