Back from Winnipeg
I was out for the past week at a family event in Winnipeg. I didn't have any access to e-mail or internet and was pretty surprised to see the number of comments from my post last week. I have to admit I don't think I'll be able to read through and reply to them all, but I'll give it my best.
Some people thought the example I gave was too simple. I'll have to work on pulling something more complex together soon. I just grabbed them from Stephen McGibbon's blog. I know that he has some more complex examples using a wordprocessing document, and I've played around with Gnumeric's support for a few weeks. I don't have a Mac so I can't test out iWorks support, but we're working on getting one set up so I can play with that.
I would point out that the level of support is pretty impressive given how new the spec is. It hasn't even been approved for ISO yet and there are already tens of millions of people on multiple platforms who can now interoperate using Open XML. We've had well over 10 million downloads of the free updates to previous versions of Microsoft Office for instance which gives those folks the ability to read and write the new formats. If you compare this to ODF and where they were 9 months after standardization it's no comparison. There have been very fundamental interoperability problems discussed for a year or so now in the few apps that claim full support for that standard. I'm not saying that's necessarily a bad thing though as I think it's to be expected both standards are still so young. I know it's hard, but let's not hold Open XML up to a drastically different bar. :-)
Some interesting things happened earlier this week that I thought were worth calling out:
- Ecma commits to deal with all comments – There has been some noise the past month or so on whether or not it would be ok for a country's national body to vote "yes" if they had issues they'd like to see dealt with. There is plenty of precedence for this as Jason Matusow points out, and Ecma has now publicly committed to dealing with all comments in the ballot resolution meeting. We've already been dealing with the comments that have been publicly available, and will continue to do so until we get everything addressed. This is just part of the overall process for a standard; it continues to improve over time.
- Germany votes "yes" for Open XML approval – Germany just recently announced that they will vote to support the Open XML standard for ISO adoption. They went the "yes with comments" route as they have some issues they'd like to see addressed for the ballot resolution meeting (which will probably be some time next year). Jason talked about this yesterday, and has some good quotes available as well: https://blogs.msdn.com/jasonmatusow/archive/2007/08/22/germany-votes-yes-with-comments.aspx
OpenXMLCommunity.org Quote of the Day:
Xandros, Inc. – United States
"In today's world where application and document interoperability is key, we believe strongly that competing office productivity applications should make it easy for customers to exchange files with one another and allow them to use the operating system and office productivity applications of their choice. Open standards enables this exchange and promotes industry competition. Open XML, the default file format for 2007 Microsoft Office, enables customers to realize this today. We support the work Microsoft and others industry groups are doing to contribute to an open standards computing environment.
Xandros believes that there are many standards bodies that can create "open standards", including both Ecma International and Oasis. Because the specification for Open XML is freely available to anyone, they are using it in both their work on the translator project and in supporting Open XML in their products.
We believe the existence of interoperability between the two file formats is key, and that interoperability exists today (as evidenced by the translator) and open standards will continue to evolve in the future."
- Jeff Kuligowski – Senior VP Sales & Marketing
-Brian
Comments
Anonymous
August 23, 2007
Brian said "Some people thought the example I gave was too simple. I'll have to work on pulling something more complex together soon." I find it appalling that you offer no excuse despite your deceptive practice. You did not test Gnumeric at all. What you did was repost content from elsewhere. Stephen McGibbon is not a technical person, he's an evangelist. You know better than anyone else what evangelists are paid for. They are not paid to tell the truth, they are paid to spin it to Microsoft sole advantage. Hence the embarassing Gnumeric example. Again, you should feel further embarassed for lying to your readers and showing trivial examples as if it reflected "very rich support" (your words, not mine). There is no sound reason why Microsoft would be giving free publicity to competitors. Until you consider a bigger picture. Let me get this straight for you : if the "new" file formats were really better, I would be congratulating the people behind it, instead of having to comment how a masquarade it is. I am absolutely appalled by the complete fraud that you guys are forcing down the throat. It's a big deal. If that were just a matter of file formats, nobody would care that much. But turning ECMA and now ISO into puppets is a huge insult to everyone in the standards ecosystem, and to the software community at large.Anonymous
August 23, 2007
Just to offer help (so that you avoid making more lies), here is what you can find in current Gnumeric's implementation (1.7.11) : // gnumeric/plugins/excel/xlsx-write.c //////////// /* TODO : (Just about everything)Figure out why XL 12 complains about cells and cols
styles
rich text
shared expressions
external refs
...
*/ static void xlsx_write_fonts (XLSXWriteState *state, GsfXMLOut *xml) { } static void xlsx_write_fills (XLSXWriteState *state, GsfXMLOut *xml) { } static void xlsx_write_borders (XLSXWriteState *state, GsfXMLOut *xml) { } ...
Anonymous
August 23, 2007
Stephane where's the lie? I simply made a spreadsheet in Gnumeric and opened it in Numbers and noted that the formulas worked. That is a simple test - but it's one that most ODS implementations fail. If you want to have a technical discussion come up with a technical argument. The fact that it works as shown is pretty hard to refute. You're absolutely right that the work is ongoing. I have no problem with that. I don't see anybody blogging about simple things you can do to show spreadsheet interoperability with ODS - that might be a space you could explore! There's no conspiracy Stephane, someone just moved the cheese that's all.Anonymous
August 23, 2007
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August 23, 2007
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August 24, 2007
Hi all, Does anyone know of an example of a feature in OOXML that cannot in implemented in ODF? Bearing in mind that you can add your own tags to ODF. JohnAnonymous
August 24, 2007
I found Jason's comments about Ecma dealing with all comments fairly bizarre. It is not up to MS or Ecma to decide what happens to comments put forward in the JTC1 process! The JTC1 process follows the JTC1 rules not the MS or Ecma rules. It is entirely possible that Ecma 376 will become an ISO/IEC standard with some but not all of the submitted comments taken into account. I notice also that Ecma has submitted a proposal to JTC1 SC34 that it should be the designated body for maintaining the standard. The proposal is currently on the agenda for the December 2007 meeting. That seems to me to be a thoroughly bad idea. I hope MS will be lobbying against that proposal. It seems to me quite contrary to all the statemens MS has been making about handing over control of Ecma 376 to others.Anonymous
August 24, 2007
Stephane, Open XML may not be for everyone, and clearly it's not for you. I get it. Thanks. I don't think we need to hear any more about it. Go tell Rob Weir how cool you think he is.
John Scholes, I think the proposal Ecma has made to the ISO is quite good. It has Ecma and ISO working together on the future evolution. Look at the state with ODF. There is no maintenance agreement. OASIS is just plowing forward with no involvement or process established with the ISO whatsoever.
John, Please read the history. It's not like ODF was around before Open XML came into the picture. They were both designed in parallel, and have fundamentally different architectures and design goals. http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2007/07/09/open-xml-timeline.aspx -Brian
Anonymous
August 24, 2007
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August 24, 2007
Brian, I've heard the claim that they have fundamentally different goals etc. So could you please give an example of where you couldn't represent something in ODF that you can in OOXML? JohnAnonymous
August 24, 2007
@John It would be a bit stretching it to include a full spreadsheet definition in an extension by adding curstom tags, or adding tables to presentations ? But even then there is plenty things you can't do with ODF. For example ODF cannot use office tags (like revisions) in included standards. ODF when changing an embedded file in the package needs to change all references to that file where OOXML only needs to change the relationship file.Anonymous
August 24, 2007
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August 24, 2007
hAl, If I understand you correctly, you can't add tables to presentations in ODF? And you can't add revision numbers to documents? Your last point isn't about features. I'll check the ODF and see about your first two points. Brian, so ODF can support everything OOXML does, but you argue that it would slightly increase the load times? That really doesn't sound like the whole "fundmental difference" thing that the OOXML pushers have been saying.Anonymous
August 24, 2007
John, Have you looked at the formats? How technical are you? This will help me understand how to better explain it to you. Thanks. -BrianAnonymous
August 24, 2007
Brian, Well, I'm able to google :-D I would consider myself fairly technical. I'm an open source coder etc. For the table-in-presentation thing, it seems that it is entirely possible. I quote from a previous poster on this blog: OpenDocument allows tables in presentations encoded in the following way: <draw:frame> <draw:object xlink:href="Link to OpenDocument spreadsheet table" /> </draw:frame> For convenience the next version of OpenDocument will also allow tables in presentations to be encoded as follows: <draw:frame> <table:table> .... </table:table> </draw:frame> End quote. I'll have a check for the revisions thing.Anonymous
August 24, 2007
John, Tables in presentations should be very easy to add. I think it's a key indicator though to the fact though that ODF was designed based on Open Office. Open Office's presentation application doesn't support tables. Instead you have to embed a spreadsheet. Every other presentation application out there allows for tables. The fact that it would be so easy to have changed the spec to allow for tables, but they chose not to is just one of many indicators that their main interest was in mirroring Open Office. This has been stated numerous times by Gary Edwards, who was one of only two people (the other guy was a Sun employee) who participated in more than 75% of the OASIS ODF meetings. I would say that makes him an expert in terms of the OASIS technical committee. He actually recently got booted off the technical committee because they didn't like his proposals for allowing ODF to support more of the legacy Microsoft Office functionality. I talked about this a bit towards the end of my post here: http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2007/07/09/open-xml-timeline.aspx Political motivations aside though, there are key differences, such as the mixed content model for ODF as compared to the flat run model for Open XML. The spreadsheet model is even more clearly different. Just look at files in the two formats. ODF is a single XML file for the entire workbook where each sheet is just another table similar to HTML tables. Open XML has broken out each sheet into a seperate XML file within the ZIP, and makes heavy use of the relationships as defined by the open packaging conventions. This allows for processes to easily address each sheet individually and even open them in parallel on a multi-core machine. The SpreadsheetML format is highly optimized for streamed parsing where you quickly want to load the data into a memory structure optimized for spreadsheets. (shared string table, shared formulas, etc.) -BrianAnonymous
August 24, 2007
Brian, What is the problem with embedding the spreadsheet? Reading in multiple files would be done serially. It is a hard disk thing. It doesn't matter how many CPUs you have - you will still read in each file serially from disk. Once the file or files are read in, you can then process them in parallel, taking advantage of parallel processing. But you could do that whether you are reading from one file or multiple files.Anonymous
August 24, 2007
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August 24, 2007
Ian, I googled around for this Gary Edwards. There seems to be a lot of posts by him. Almost all of his posts appear to be complaints about Microsoft. I can't find a link about why he was kicked out of OASIS. Anyone have a report on that? Ian, could you please stick to actual examples. Those I can judge. Just saying that it's incompatible doesn't really show anything. Weren't MS in the OASIS group? From reading Edwards posts, I can see why there was a lot of hostility towards Microsoft. Microsoft hindered their work at ever step - especially when it comes to cross compatibility (This is Edwards opinions from his many complaints about Microsoft)Anonymous
August 24, 2007
John, Take a look at this link: http://odf-converter.sourceforge.net/features.html It lists all of the features that are currently unconvertable between ODF and OOXML. Admittedly, some of the features could be implemented by extending ODF. Such unwanted extension, however, would likely provoke the ire of OASIS and its defenders--recall how problematic Microsoft's (and Netscape's) extensions to HTML were! In addition, extending ODF would yield documents that would be unreadable in ANY other ODF implementation. OpenOffice and co. simply do not have possess the functionality or logic to, e.g., to generate tables of contents/authorities from styles or deal with rows above 65,536 (in word processing and spreadsheet documents, respectively.) This are big features--they both sway users to Office instead of OpenOffice and take a lot of coding gruntwork to implement.Anonymous
August 24, 2007
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August 25, 2007
John, There is no incentive for MS to extend ODF to match OOXML. So, what you have suggested won't happen (even if it were technically possible). In any case, what's the point of extending ODF to match OOXML's capabilities anyway? Who would gain from this? I think the answer is "no one".Anonymous
August 25, 2007
Ian, I agree that there is no way MS would do this. Their history on standards is extremely poor. What would be the point? Well looking over the list of missing features, there's only a few. And quite a few of them will be fixed in the next revision of ODF anyway. The point would be that we could then have a nice standard that everyone supports. If it means that for a few versions there a dozen bugs, then that's not so bad. Have a look at the list of incompatibilities yourself. But since we are going to have two standards it seems, does anyone know when Microsoft Office will support both standards? And no, having to download 3rd party plugins from elsewhere doesn't count. ;)Anonymous
August 25, 2007
John, Technical problems aside, please realize that ODF and Open XML were developed in parrallel. Just because Sun decided to take it's format to a standards body first doesn't mean that's the one everyone has to rally around. HTML was a much more widespread standard format, and we did build in native support for that almost a decade ago. -BrianAnonymous
August 25, 2007
Brian, Look.. if Microsoft was really interested in developing an open standard, then they would have done so in an open fashion. They would have done so on an open forum, inviting other developers, and so on. They would have reused existing standards where possible and would have worked with the community. Microsoft blocks standards at every turn. Do you even properly support PNG yet? Or OGG? You mention standard HTML, but lets be honest - we both know that the HTML output from Word was.. well just awful. It was cleaned up I think in recent versions, and I think that now it actually produces standards compliant HTML code, but it certainly didn't used to. I don't want to be the guy bashing MS here. Why don't you guys actually work with the community and do something nice? I realise there are stock holders etc, but MS Office is a fantastic bit of software. It can compete by itself just fine without underhanded tactics.Anonymous
August 25, 2007
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August 25, 2007
John, your latest comment shows you are misinformed, out of date, or both. First, acquaint yourself with the history of the development of OOXML before you pronounce it closed, etc. ODF was basically developed by two guys in an OASIS committee; by contrast, OOXML was dealt with by ECMA in a very open fashion by people from a couple of dozen areas of different types (software companies, hardware companies, libraries, etc.). There simply is no comparison between the two in terms of participation and openness. As for your other comments about MS blocking standards, you need to have a current reality check there! Your comment about lack of proper PNG support is an example -- PNG works just fine in IE7 and Windows. And since when is OGG an international standard? It isn't. It's just one of dozens of minor audio/video codecs out there. (I had to google it a few months ago to see what the heck it was, since apparently Wikipedia uses it.) By the way, Windows uses WMA and WMV as their normal codecs, which are Microsoft's implementations of the VC-1 standard codec from the IEEE. You didn't know that Windows' default codecs are standards-based, did you?Anonymous
August 25, 2007
Thanks both for your comments. Ian, Sorry that I was misinformed. Could you point me to the mailing lists please? I don't think PNG works that well in even IE7. Do these both render okay to you? http://www.jeria.net/png_test/ I did not know that about WMA and WMV. Can you provide a link for that too sorry? Wikipedia says they are proprietary, and I can't seem to find anything on google :( I don't think you can class Ogg as "one of dozens". It's the only lossy music format that I know off that is open and free for people to implement.Anonymous
August 25, 2007
did you mean "non-lossy"?Anonymous
August 25, 2007
Brian, I posted some FAQ questions in the thread "A few interesting links" on Thursday (or perhaps Friday, depending on where your server's located). It was large with a lot of html tags, so it's probably been tagged as spam, and new comments have been disabled there now. Would you mind untagging it? I still have the text of the post, so if that's difficult, I can repost it or send it through your contact page.- Andrew
Anonymous
August 25, 2007
Brian, hmm? No lossy - it's like mp3. except it's free etc.Anonymous
August 26, 2007
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August 26, 2007
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August 26, 2007
Brian, Hehe :) Thanks for taking the time to talk to me - it's appreciated. I'll remain a hopeful sceptic for now :) JohnAnonymous
August 27, 2007
Thanks for untagging my earlier post - I hope it's useful in creating a proper FAQ. To restate my query from that post, why did you go for a trie rather than a suffix tree in Office? I've used both structures a little in my own work, and I'd like to know if there's some technical property I should be aware of.- Andrew
Anonymous
August 27, 2007
"What is the problem with embedding the spreadsheet [to represent tables in a presentation]?" For one thing, it assumes that all tables can be represented as spreadsheets. PowerPoint and Word support "irregular" tables, one in which individual cells can be divided horizontally or vertically not in accordance wiht the "row" or "column" in which they lay (indeed, the notions of "row" and "column" become fuzzy for such tables). For another thing, it's pretty sloppy to require a heavy-duty spreadsheet embedding where a light-weight table would suffice.Anonymous
August 28, 2007
John said: "I don't think you can class Ogg as "one of dozens". It's the only lossy music format that I know off that is open and free for people to implement." You alleged that Microsoft "blocks standards at every turn" and supported this statement by asking if they properly support OGG. Ian was simply pointing out that OGG is not a standard and is therefore an inappropriate example of Microsoft "blocking standards at every turn." In other words, whether Microsoft supports OGG or not has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with any industry standards.Anonymous
August 28, 2007
John, Thanks for the conversation, I thought it was great.
Andrew, No problem, not sure why but it had flagged your comment as potential SPAM. It happens every once and awhile, and it usually takes me a few days to notice. I'll try to pull something together, but most likely it will need to wait for a few weeks. Things are really busy right now (I'm actually in Toronto for Ecma meetings today).
Bruno, That's a great point. I think many people view tables and spreadsheets as the same thing, which I think is a mistake. There are tables for presentation purposes as they exist in a wordprocessingML or presenationML file, and then there is a table of data which you have in a spreadsheet. -Brian
Anonymous
August 28, 2007
John said: "I don't think you can class Ogg as "one of dozens". It's the only lossy music format that I know off that is open and free for people to implement." You alleged that Microsoft "blocks standards at every turn" and supported this statement by asking if they properly support OGG. Ian was simply pointing out that OGG is not a standard and is therefore an inappropriate example of Microsoft "blocking standards at every turn." In other words, whether Microsoft supports OGG or not has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with any industry standards.Anonymous
August 28, 2007
Hi Craig, Fair enough. But there is no free and open standard for lossy music formats that I know of. Ogg is the only one that has been proposed (It is an IETF RFC) and it is already the industry standard in Linux. Many music players support the format (Except MS's Zune of course). Given that the codecs for it are free, open source (and BSD licensed), and the specs are open, patent-free etc, what is the reason that Windows does not support it? It is the same reason PNG support is half hearted at best - because MS do not like standards. Standards allow outsiders to be able to interoperate - which is always a bad thing for MS.Anonymous
August 28, 2007
I cannot speak as the reason Windows, the Zune, or Windows Media player do not natively support Ogg/Vorbis. I'm sure it's a valid question and there are probably reasons for it, just as there are reasons that the iPod, iTunes, and the Macintosh OS don't natively support it either. I think it is a very big stretch of an assumption to believe that the reason that OGG is not natively supported in Windows is because Microsoft does not like standards, despite a single out of context email sent almost a decade ago by someone who is leaving Microsoft. In my opinion, it is more likely that native support for OGG was not included because Microsoft's customers were simply asking for other things. Additionally, just because it's used on every Linux fan's computer does not make it an "industry standard" and in fact Ogg is far from it. Microsoft can make the same argument here as their detractors in that it would not make sense for them to implement something which does not appear to be standardized, especially given the open source camp's commitment to disregard backward compatibility and consistency between versions of other various "standards." There simply is not enough demand for it among Microsoft's customers to deal with it when they can just as easily license other standard and more accepted formats. And there is absolutely nothing preventing anyone from installing an Ogg codec in Windows. And if it were any other company than Microsoft, everyone would be calling the PNG thing what it is ... a bug. There wouldn't be conspiracy theories about it.Anonymous
August 28, 2007
Craig, If you feel that Bill Gates' email is just "taken out of context" then there really isn't much I can say. JohnAnonymous
August 29, 2007
John, if you're going to judge us based on an e-mail from Bill that is 10 years old, than there isn't much more I can say... People change, companies change, strategies change, markets change, governments change, technologies change, scenarios change... -BrianAnonymous
May 31, 2008
I was out for the past week at a family event in Winnipeg. I didn't have any access to e-mail or internet and was pretty surprised to see the number of comments from my post last week . I have to admit I don't think I'll be able to read through and repl