Friday thoughts

Some really interesting things to note for the week:

1. New blog on Math in Office – Murray Sargent who was the key architect behind the new math functionality in Office 2007 has started blogging. Check out his first post on Formula Autobuildup in Word 2007. Murray was the one who I'd mentioned having discussions with early on about whether or not MathML would be possible to use as the default persistence format for math in Word. It turned out that it wasn't going to meet our needs (another example was that we needed the <func> and <nary> tags), but Murray is hoping to help share a lot of our experiences with the folks working on the MathML 3.0 standard. I think he's even thinking about joining the working group.

2. Difficult decisions between loose conformance and true interoperability – Rick Jelliffe had a great post earlier this week discussing the problems you get when you allow for really loose conformance. I talked about it in a post (made about 30 minutes ago), but wanted to bring it up again. I'm interested to hear how folks feel about the latest working draft of the spec. We were really concerned about getting the conformance clause nailed, because we knew that it was something people would really want to see done right. As you can see, Rick was disappointed by statements he'd seen around another standard:

   If Microsoft wrote this, we would be up in arms: "people have been able to exchange spreadsheets using completely undocumented formats, such as Excel's, for many years so this notion that documents "can't be exchanged" until every jot and tiddle is written down is simply untrue. " What a snowjob! Actually, the quote comes from the ODF website.

3. Traitors or Mercenaries - It's really a shame that there are folks out there that get worked up into this "us vs. them" way of thinking. I talked about this in an older post called "There can be only one?" Well it looks like the folks working on the ODF to Open XML translator project are running into similar problems (https://odf-converter.sourceforge.net/blog/index.php?2006/09/07/5-are-we-traitors-or-mercenaries). They've had some meetings with the Open Office folks and the ODF folks and had some interesting reactions. I think that we're making some really good strides here though, and I hope that as we continue in this direction with the standard those remaining doubters will be convinced. Here's a little blurb from Jean's post:

   What I see is that Microsoft is taking a new turn on the interoperability field - yes it goes slowly, very slowly, but hey! that's Microsoft! We're not speaking of a little agile company. Yes, they could have done better regarding ODF compatibility, but they could have done less as well. So we have here an opportunity to do a good job, to allow MS Office users to work with ODF documents: let's give this initiative a chance. I'm not saying that OpenOffice.org or OASIS hostility are a threat for the success of this project - but for sure things wouldn't go worse if they supported it!

4. IBM comments about level of ODF support – Interesting comments in Andy Updegrove's blog about the level of ODF support in IBM workplace. I had thought they just took the Open Office code base for their support so I was kind of surprised to see they didn't have full support yet. I would think it's not going to be too far away though given that IBM has been ODF's most vocal proponent for the past year or two:

   Q: Which of these products will be compliant with ODF?

   A: Today, the IBM productivity editors do not fully support Open Document Format with 100% compliance. Implementation to complete support for SVG (graphics), SMIL (animation), and XForms (forms) will be complete in the next major release. IBM productivity editors can edit and save to Microsoft Office formats as well.

5. Beta 2 of the XPS Essentials Pack - Beta 2 of the XPS essentials pack has been released to the web (https://blogs.msdn.com/xps/archive/2006/09/08/746616.aspx). It contains:

   • A stand-alone XPS Document Viewer
   • Microsoft XPS Document Writer to output files to the XPS Document format through the print command of any Windows application. 
   • iPreview and iFilter interface implementations for XPS Documents
   • XPSDrv printer driver to enable printing to XPS devices.
   • Shell extensions for inspecting and changing XPS Document properties in Windows Explorer

6. No sleep - Two weeks ago to celebrate our 2 year anniversary my wife and I got a Weimaraner puppy. I get a kick out of her but man is she a lot of work (the puppy J). I haven't had a full night's sleep in a couple weeks now. Her name is Luna and I love coming home to her, but I can't wait until she gets a little older and doesn't have to be taken outside every 2-3 hours (and I can actually start taking her on hikes, etc.). I'll post some pictures of her at some point since somehow I'm having that same reaction people with new born kids get. I can't stop telling people how cool she is. J

7. American Football – The Huskies won last week, although it wasn't too convincing of a win. This week against Oklahoma has me pretty nervous, but I'm also a very optimistic person (some would say way too overly optimistic) so I'm hoping for a win. I'm really excited about the Seahawk game though. I was a huge Jon Kitna fan when he was here with the Seahawks, and I'm curious to see how he's going to be in Martz's new system. I'm not too nervous for the Hawks, but the first game of the season is always a bit of a question mark.

Have a great weekend everyone.

-Brian

Comments

• Anonymous
  September 08, 2006
  Personally, I loved this quote from the ODF site: "and the dreadfully incomplete Microsoft XML format"
  
  I'm wondering why OpenXML is "dreadfully incomplete".  What's missing?
  

• Anonymous
  September 08, 2006
  You'll have to post the pictures of the first "Luna Tick" you find too.  Have a good weekend.
  
  Oh and... "Boomer Sooner".

• Anonymous
  September 08, 2006
  Larry, I hadn't notice that. That's pretty funny since at other times they have complained that there is too much information for Open XML. :-)
  
  TDM, every evening around 6 or 7 she turns into a "Luna Tick" and start biting at everything. I'll have to watch more episodes of the Dog Whisperer or something...
  Oh and... "Go Dogs" :-)
  
  -Brian

• Anonymous
  September 08, 2006
  Partial conformance could be very problematic, especially when the user is round-tripping data between two applications. Imagine a Venn diagram--only the area of overlap will be preserved.
  
  The result of this will be a lot of data being converted or flattened (generally a loss of structure and the benefits that accrue with structure.)
  
  This could be extremely frustrating unless you minimally "predefine" application behavior. A couple of suggestions:
  1. If data is going to be converted (e.g., formulas computed into values), the user should be advised of this. If this flattening occurs invisibly, users will discover the loss of information after the fact, and most will not have backup to revert to. This alert behavior could be modeled on Excel's Compatibility Checker.
  2. Applications should only modify the parts of a document that the user modifies in that application. Say I open a spreadsheet with columns A-M in another application ("x") with the intent of deriving new information from those columns. This data would then be written to columns N-Z. If I do not touch columns A-M in program "x," they should not be converted or re-encoded. (Applications whose internal representation of open files often differs from the saved format would have to flag unmodified parts of the file.)

• Anonymous
  September 09, 2006
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  September 10, 2006
  I thought it wise to do some diligence and see what OO.o has in terms of an ODF compliance statement.  I may not have found the right place, but my search for "ODF" on the site was surprisingly unsuccessful.  I found a nice report on a mailing list concerning citations and bibliographies and a concern for roundtripping between OOX and ODF where possible (this from Bruce D' Arcus).  But this is about new work at an ODF subcommittee.
  
  I found the declaration that OO.o "uses" the Open Document Format.  That is the strongest statement I have found, and it is in feature summaries.  There are no details to back that up.
  
  I found bug reports but no specific test plan or approach to confirming ODF compliance.  There is no specific declaration about conformance and any technical description of what one needs to know about OO.o's ODF in an interchange situation.  
  
  One bug report points out how ODF is being process and produced incorrectly (presumably a misinterpretation of the spec.) for certain text case.  These reports seem to be kind of random based on things people run into.
  
  I found an interesting closed bug report (#66168, opened June 6 of this year) that confirms the introduction of "non-standard" attributes in ODF namespaces as a by-design way to preserve some material from other formats (e.g., Microsoft Office).  We discussed this.
  
  There is a still-open 2003-04-20 item on MathML 1.01 support that may impact ODF.  The use of weird Unicode characters (opened 2006-09-07) that I noticed in a little test is going to be addressed in OO.o release 2.0.4.
  
  I'm hoping I missed something.
  
  [I will be similarly attentive for declarations of OOX support of course, especially by OOX-ODF converters.]

• Anonymous
  September 10, 2006
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  September 12, 2006
  The comment has been removed

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