Great article about MS OOXML

Microsoft is of course still working on getting their OOXML format accepted as an open standarda at ISO. I'm of the opinion that it should never be accepted and this article is another in a long row of articles that explains why: THE DEPRECATED “SMOKE SCREEN” OF MS OFFICE OPEN XML (OOXML)

Here is a quote:

Launch Microsoft Office and try to save a file in the format specified by the draft standard at ISO. You can’t. There is no compatibility mode in Microsoft Office that limits input to the feature set specified in the official Microsoft Office Open XML draft ISO standard. Any suggestions of interoperability for anyone wanting to support the Microsoft Office Open XML specification is ridiculous, especially since Microsoft itself won’t allow its customers to write to that format.

How much is 6000 pages?

6000 pages is what Microsofts OOXML specification fills and some Czech guy decided to cut down a forest or two and print it all out!

BTW - with the help of Dan, Jirka and Filip, we were able to "print" the complete OOXML specification, bind it in six volumes (1000 sheets per volume) and we brought it with us to the workshop. It was a bit heavy, but I was lucky enough to find parking place in very short distance to ČNI offices (without the knowledge of where the offices exactly are, in the centre of Prague, I still can't believe it ;-) - have you ever seen 75 cm tall "tower" from paper? We have many photos from the workshop and will publish them as soon as possible, so you'll be able to see it soon.

[...]

I have read approx. 200 pages of the specification and I decided to stop, because it is dangerous. The ideas presented in various parts of the specification (like two ways to represent the date - one of them representing dates between 1900 and 20000 and another one to represent dates between 1904 and 20000 where the second one is a complete subset of the first one!) are dangerous to the mental health of the reader. The innovative method of storing the language code (e.g. the decimal integer 58380 into two digit hexadecimal number) is also worth a world-wide patent...

I simply can't believe that developers and or TC45 members from Apple, Barclays Capital, BP, The British Library, Essilor, Intel, Microsoft, NextPage, Novell, Statoil, Toshiba, and the United States Library of Congress actually read the final document. I can't believe it. If I ever write such document, I surely won't sign it by my name. Why?

Yet another post about why open standards matter

What was one of the major reasons why the web became a succes? Easy: Everything you needed was freely available and it has made the web into what it is today. Of course there are problems but nothing is perfect. One of the major problems is proprietary code and formats. The major one currently is Adobe Flash. It wasn't until recently that Adobe released Flash version 9 for Linux which for most people might be good enough, but it is only available for 32bit so 64 bit users are out of luck. Of course you could argue that they are the lucky ones ;)

Now it seems the fight has increased since both Adobe and Microsoft have released various web stuff of which some of it is open source, but it is far from ideal which is very nicely summed up by Mark Pilgrim on his blog:

Springtime means conference time, which means it’s silly season on the web again. Adobe introduced Apollo, their latest attempt to recreate the web in their own image. Apollo is based on Adobe’s own markup language, Adobe’s own runtime, Adobe’s own graphics and animation framework, Adobe’s own video and audio codecs, and Adobe’s own developer tools. You can do many things with it, but “you may not sublicense or distribute the Software. … You may not modify, adapt, translate or create derivative works based upon the Software. You may not reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble or otherwise attempt to discover the source code of the Software. … You may not install or use the Software on any non-PC device or with any embedded or device version of any operating system.” It requires at least Windows XP SP 2 or Mac OS X 10.4.

Microsoft is using more or less the same restrictions, but I recommend reading the rest of his blog post/rant. The advice: Stay far away from these products. I totally agree.

OOXML vs ODF - the stakes are high

Currently, Microsoft is trying to get their OOXML format to become an ISO standard and the success there is very important to them. If it is rejected then governments around the world is likely to choose the competing ODF format as their document standard. A thing Microsoft most certainly don't want. this rant from Rob Weir (an IBM employee) details some of the recent things that have happened, here is a snippet:

ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34 recently had its annual plenary. This is the same group of ISO National Body (NB) members who voted in favor of ODF last year, and over the next few months many of them will be recommending positions on Microsoft's OOXML to their national standards bodies. I was on the delegates list for attending this meeting, as a representative of the US NB, but had to cancel at the last minute because of a family emergency. When I saw the attendance list, I was surprised to see that Microsoft had sent five people, this to a meeting of only 37 people. They practically darkened the skies with their employees. And what about the conspiratorial army that is hounding them at every corner? Zero people from IBM. Zero as well for Google, Sun, RedHat, Adobe, Oracle and Novell.

Russian schools move to Linux

A school in Russia has been cought using pirated software from Microsoft. Whether the school knew it was pirated software or not is unclear, but according to the article, the school will switch to using Linux to avoid this happening again. Not everyone is happy about this though:

Teachers are not that happy about it. Apparently not many of them know much about Linux and there are no specialists around to teach them.

I guess they will have to learn it now, which you could say is what you're supposed to do in a school. You know, learn stuff ;)

Microsoft ODF Translator v1.0

So, it has been released, but is it any good? The answer seems to be a big NO and maybe more interesting to know is that it will never work:

The abridged version of the story is that XSLT methods for transforming from one dialect of W3C-conforming XML to another dialect of W3C-conforming XML will always work. It is definitional. If it does not work, then one of the "W3C-conforming" dialects is a punk. Well, we and Microsoft know XSLT well enough to know in advance that the design of Microsoft Office Open XML would make it impossible for this, the Clever Age approach, to work for the Translator. Let me say this clearly: Microsoft knew in advance that XSLT would provide shitty tranform from Microsoft Office Open XML to ODF and they funded the Clever Age project to use this method.

None of that is surprising of course, Microsoft is simply trying to protect their big cash cow (MS Office) and they will use any and all tricks in the book to keep their lock-in.

More on Microsoft's Office Open XML

Here is another article about how bad this "standard" is. It contains quite a few examples that really shows why it is bad and that it will be very difficult for anyone but Microsoft to implement it. Here is a nice quote:

This is not a specification; this is a DNA sequence.