Re: It makes no sense

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Re: It makes no sense
by Terry Cole on Saturday 03/Nov/2007, @15:32

The refusal to consider OOXML even if supported as a standard does seem hypocritical at first glance but only a little digging shows it's the only possible choice.

To begin with, Microsoft does not intend to support its own standard. The reason given by Microsoft was that once a standard, OOXML would necessarily have a governing board which is not Microsoft, and Microsoft refuses to guarantee that it will follow decisions imposed by a standards organization.

When you have 90% market share you can get away with this. Microsoft then has the rest of the world scrambling to keep up with OOXML which is broadly compatible with its own products, but is not itself obligated to follow inconvenient decisions. The technical committee for the standard will then be in the position of forever trying to catch up to changes by MS which are never properly documented.

Second, neither Sun nor KOffice nor the ODF developers are trying to supplant MS Office formats. Market share is not the immediate objective. The main reason why ODF is gaining traction is that it allows for archival formats which will forever be readable by future word processors, etc. This is why librarians and archivists the world over have been clamouring for such a standard. Since ODF is a slim, technically complete standard available right now which does the job, neither KOffice nor OOo nor Abiword has any particular reason to support MS-OOXML.

Third, the OOXML converters you mention have a huge problem. They do not (and can not, because OOXML is not completely specified) perfectly convert between ODF and OOXML. Nor will they ever be able to, since OOXML contains 'binary blobs' which are not properly understood at this time even by Microsoft. This is one reason why the French ISO representatives at one point suggested that the proper designation of OOXML was not a standard, but an ISO TS (technical specification). A TS does not have to meet the very high consistency and completeness criteria of a standard.

Regards, TC

Related Links

·   Articles on KDE Office Suite
·   Also by Terry Cole
·   Contact author

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Re: It makes no sense
by yxxcvsdfbnfgnds on Sunday 04/Nov/2007, @13:18

"Third, the OOXML converters you mention have a huge problem. They do not (and can not, because OOXML is not completely specified) perfectly convert between ODF and OOXML."

Who wrote something about perfect support? I just wrote about not fragging documents. I did some experimenting with the CLI odf-converter and from what I saw the conversation is quite good.

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