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A closer look at ODF and MS-OOXML, one of the biggest issues of our time

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Ehtyar:
For those of us who don't wish to see MSOOXML as an ISO standard (see link below for reasons) here is the official petition to have it stopped. The final decision is set for February 2008.


NO OPEN OFFICE XML
Ehtyar.

f0dder:
I'm not too keen on either of the two formats, but OOXML is clearly evil, and the way MS have been pushing it and trying to fasttrack it through ISO is nasty. Shame on them.

I still find myself running Office2000 though, because even on my not-so-shabby machine, OpenOffice is a drag to load. Even second-time runs when executables, DLLs, etc. are all cached. And the museum I do admin'ing for can't move away from MS Office either, because "everybody else" are using MSO, and (because of closed fileformats) OO can't read everything properly.

It's a big royal mess. I hope MS will ultimately dump OOXML and use either it's old .doc format or ODF as primary document format. But that's a dream, and we all know it won't happen, and that ISO will eventually accept OOXML as a standard. You know how it goes: "god money, I'll do anything for you..."

Lashiec:
The plot thickens, and a challenger appears. On a first look, it may not be that bad, as being designed by the W3C would mean that every browser in the future would support it (as portrayed in the article, Opera developers are already tinkering with the idea), saving one of the major hurdles IMO that ODF (and OOXML, but this one has enough problems of its own) has in the nonexistence of lightweight freeware readers. No, OpenOffice browser plugin doesn't count as a viewer, it's too heavy for a browser.

zridling:
Not really, Lashiec. First, ODF is controlled by the OASIS, which is the OpenDocument Alliance; The OpenDocument "Foundation" was just three guys in a garage with a website. They spent much of their ODF time ragging on other members. CDF is instead a framework for a variety of open documents, built around the ideas of mobility and portability. CDF takes the emphasis (of code dependency) off the platform and off the app and places it on the format itself, something neither MS-OOXML nor ODF currently do.

Here's the problem. In the last sixty days, over a dozen new applications have implemented ODF into their code, many as the native file format. Beyond its ISO certification, the ODF has undergone three revisions. It takes OpenOffice alone 2-3 years to code those changes throughout the software, meaning applications — any app that deploys ODF — will always be running behind the spec. Meanwhile changes are submitted to ISO to update the specification and there's nothing to test them on.

CDF is in fact a good idea. But it does not replace ODF, rather it puts ODF within a family of other open formats under the W3C umbrella.

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