There can be only one?

I had a few people point me at a couple of IBM blogs today (Bob Sutor and Rob Weir) and I have to admit I was a little disappointed to see that they are really working hard to continue to push negative views of the Office Open XML formats. Basically they want to position it in such a way that there is a winner and a loser, and it's no surprise that they think the winner should be the one they've put all their resources behind (ODF). It's definitely a strong "us vs. them" mentality that you also see a lot in politics these days. I admit I've pushed back in the other direction at times and had some criticisms of the Open Document format, but those have always been in response to folks who ask why we couldn't use ODF as the default format for Microsoft Office. I had always stated that we needed a format that could fully support all of the features our customers used, and when the ODF folks snapped back saying that I wasn't providing enough concrete examples, I decided to start providing specific problems. I've never said the world can't use ODF, I've just said that the Office Open XML formats are also necessary. I feel like some of these folks have watched Highlander one too many times (hence the title of this post). I would never make the claim that the HTML format means that ODF isn't necessary, and I certainly don't believe the ODF means that Office Open XML isn't necessary.

The latest criticism from Bob and Rob is that the Open XML formats don't use MathML, and instead define a separate XML syntax for a Math Presentation format. Rob even displayed a bit of a flare for the dramatic, as he titles his post "Math you can't use" and Bob followed up with "Making bad choices, over and over again." Well thankfully this isn't really true, and to be honest, if posts like that aren't considered 'FUD' I don't know what is. Every piece of the Office Open XML format is being fully defined in Ecma, and we've even built XSLTs that will transform from MathML and back. In addition to that, we've worked closely with different companies out there that already support MathML to make sure we are compatible with their solutions. We support MathML on the clipboard, so you can paste a MathML equation into Word. Here is the latest version of the XSLT that takes the Office Open XML format for Math and transforms it into MathML (https://jonesxml.com/resources/omml2mml.xsl), and here is the XSLT that goes in the opposite direction (https://jonesxml.com/resources/mml2omml.xsl). Anyone who has Beta 2 of Office 2007 should already have these on their machine under "Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12".

Just in case folks aren't sure what I'm talking about, this is all about the presentation form of MathML. The math is never actually calculated, only displayed. Also note that this is different from the discussions around functions, which are a large part of the SpreadsheetML specification. Unlike the spreadsheet functions, the Math support is all around scenarios like academic papers that need to use formulas as part of the information they are presenting.

I remember a few years ago having a discussion with Murray Sargent, who was one of the key folks behind the new math support in Office 2007. He also had worked on the MathML 2.0 standards body before it was dissolved, and we talked about whether or not we could use MathML for the formats. He obviously was very familiar with the MathML format, and the conclusion was that we unfortunately couldn't use MathML in our new default XML formats. We found that while MathML works great for isolated math islands, it didn't give us everything we needed at the document-level. Although MathML does have space for annotations so we could have extended it, that would not have worked well with document-level features like comments, track changes, Word styles, etc. The equation support in Word 2007 is actually very impressive, and if you haven't taken a look yet I strongly suggest you give it a try.

We did agree though that we should fully support MathML as an interoperability language between apps, which is why we can read and write Presentation MathML on the clipboard (leveraging those XSLTs).

This is just another example of the difficult decisions we had to make when building these new formats. Of course we would have loved to have just used MathML, as it was already fully designed and documented. It would have been much easier, but it would have also meant we would have to either cut back the functionality, or extend it in such ways that it was no longer as usable. If you ever used the HTML formats from prior versions of Office, you've seen that when you try to take a format that was designed for other purposes and add extensions so that it can represent your files you often end up with a rather complex and unmanageable result. So instead, we used MathML as a guide, and tried to leverage as much of the design as we could. We had to make sure we could support our features though and not let the format put the end user in a bad state. Most of our users don't care the least bit about XML and XML formats, and if moving to the new file formats meant things like tracked changes wouldn't work on the equations, then folks would have chosen to stick with the binary formats instead. So we instead have an XML format that supports all of the features, and that format is fully documented and free for anyone to use. Not a bad deal in my view. I can't say enough how proud those of us are who worked on the formats are. It's such an important change in the world of Office documents.

-Brian

Comments

• Anonymous
  August 15, 2006
  "I was a little disappointed to see that they are really working hard to continue to push negative views of the Office Open XML formats".
  
  This is a little rich when you continue to push negative views of ODF.
  
  
  "This is just another example of the difficult decisions we had to make when building these new formats".
  
  Then maybe you will allow ODF the same leeway.
  
  
  And then maybe we can get back to the technical aspects of Office XML.
  
  John.
  --
  
  

• Anonymous
  August 15, 2006
  Well, one thing is disagreeing with design choices that are made when creating a standard, and I bet IBM would be very welcome to voice their concerns about the non-use of MathML in the ECMA TC45 subcomitee.
  
  Another very different thing is to rush a semi-complete, draft-level standard through ISO, falsely claim that "billions of existing office documents will be able to be converted ... with no loss of data, formatting, properties, or capabilities", and then use it as a selling point to government worldwide.
  
  Nice try from Rob and Bob though.

• Anonymous
  August 16, 2006
  You don't state why you don't use MathML in your spec though, only saying 'we can interop with it fine, look'. Why wasn't MathML used? If you can convert to and fro with XSLTs, I see no reason to re-invent the wheel and define a new standard for your app.

• Anonymous
  August 16, 2006
  John,
  
  I think you missed the point of my post. I have no problem with ODF, and people can use it as much as they want.
  My only criticisms of ODF have been in response to people that have tried to push it as the one and only standard for Office documents. I've tried to cite examples of why the ODF format was not something we could use as a default format for Office.
  
  Fernando,
  
  You are correct that anyone is free to voice disagreements with design choices. IBM is a member of Ecma international, but has decided not to participate in the TC45 work. I think that one of the reasons that the IBM folks don't understand the design decisions of Open XML is that they don't see how the goals of the two formats are quite different. ODF was never intended to fully represent all the features that Microsoft Office customers use. Open XML absolutely had to meet that requirement.
  
  James,
  
  Actually I did state above why we couldn't use it in the default format:
  "Although MathML does have space for annotations so we could have extended it, that would not have worked well with document-level features like comments, track changes, Word styles, etc."
  
  -Brian
  

• Anonymous
  August 16, 2006
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  August 16, 2006
  Dear Brian,
  
  In your reply to Fernando, you kinda complain that IBM did not participate in TC45 eventhough they are Ecma members. Isn't it the same as complaining that Microsoft does not participate in ODF committee at Oasis despite being members of Oasis?
  
  Another problem I see is that negative comments about ODF and OpenXML at such a late stage for both formats (ODF out of OASIS into ISO, Office 07 close to shipping),  making it impossible have a proper discussion about the design decision.
  
  I'm going to be critical here. Rob presented his case about MathML. His arguement is effectively MathML can be used in different apps as-it-is. You skirted this question by saying an XSLT transform is available and direct cut-and-paste from MathML is supported. Both are great but why do other developers have to go through the humilation of a transformation? Unfortunately, your anwser to this is less than persuasive here. It sounds like "trust me coz I know better". You mentioned MathML is not cooperating well with document level objects, it would be great if you had XML sniplets to demonstrate your case.

• Anonymous
  August 16, 2006
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  August 16, 2006
  I think folks may have forgotten that the Office applications have supported standards for years now. We've supported open and saving Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations as HTML files. We've done this since Office 2000, and we also did a lot of work to add our own attributes to the HTML so that we could preserve all the features our customers used. These extensions are what a few of you are now asking us to do with things like ODF and MathML. If anyone has used the HTML that we output, you'll see it's pretty complex because of those extensions. In fact, we've had a lot of people complain quite loudly that the extensions were not the right thing to do, and that we should instead have just blocked people from using features that couldn't be represented in the HTML standard (without extensions).
  
  The Office Open XML format was not intended to be a generic document format standard. It is a standard that was intended to be compatible with Microsoft Office documents. This is really an important point. We were in a world where all of the documents our customers saved were in a binary format that was extremely difficult to build solutions around for third parties. We wanted to move out of that binary world and create a new XML format that would be open, free, and fully documented. This new XML format though had to still do everything that the old binary formats could do, otherwise our customers wouldn't use it. That is a really important piece to understand when looking at the design of Open XML.
  
  In terms of ODF, I've never said it's not a good generic format. It just doesn't work as the default for Office. We've said that if there is significant customer demand, we would build in support for ODF as well. There was actually a good amount of demand from the government sector, and while it's too late to add new functionality directly into Office 2007, we created an open source add-in project that will give people ODF support in Office. So people that want to use the more generic format (with some feature loss) are now free to do so. From my point of view, this isn't an "us vs. them" issue. It's about choice, and we've actually historically provided a good amount of choice with file formats in Office (RTF, Text, HTML, XML, binary, other app binaries, PDF, etc.).
  
  -Brian

• Anonymous
  August 16, 2006
  I can certainly appreciate that MathML may not be easy to integrate with all the document features provided by Open XML, and if the gentleman you mentioned worked on the MathML spec, I'm going to presume he knows what he's talking about. :-)
  
  That said, would it be possible to treat MathML as a special custom XML schema? Meaning you could store equations as MathML chunks in the package, which could be kept in sync with the document. This would make it easy to extract equations, process them, or insert them back in--and would allow us to leverage the large number of MathML tools available. I know it's getting late in the dev cycle, and I admit haven't had the time to fully explore custom schemas to understand their limitations, but maybe it's something that could be considered for a future revision to the standard?
  
  On a related note, are you aware of any groups at Microsoft--within Office or otherwise--that are actively working with the MathML standards people? Ultimately, I'd love to see MathML get platform-level support so that is could be leveraged by other applications (i.e., IE).
  
  Thanks.

• Anonymous
  August 16, 2006
  Brian-
  
  The term 'standard' means one thing. To suggest there can be two standards is bad grammar (oxymoron) as well as bad technology.

• Anonymous
  August 16, 2006
  It's all very well to respond to ODF FUD in blogs, but the fact is, ODF advocates like IBM are feeding these sorts of lies and distortions to governments in an attempt to persuade (read "trick") governments into exclusively mandating use of ODF.  Microsoft needs to really step up its lobbying efforts or else the world will be stuck with ODF based on lies rather than technical merit.

• Anonymous
  August 16, 2006
  Wow, it takes some guts from someone from Microsoft to bring up the Highlander syndrome. Has there been a mea culpa from Microsoft when they chopped off the heads of Netscape, Lotus, BeOS, etc., that I missed? Otherwise, I think it's just a tad hypocritical.

• Anonymous
  August 16, 2006
  I don't understand Sam Hiser's comment.  
  
  For there to be multiple standards in a field of application is quite common.  
  
  At the ISO level, there were already both SGML and ODA (the, ahem, Open Document Architecture).   Look at graphics standards and standards for image formats.  
  
  Some times the multiple standards are promulgated by the same organization, some times by others.  The U.S. is still not on the full set of metric standards and yet the non-metric standards used in the U.S. are standards nonetheless, and the metric standards are also usable in many US settings.

• Anonymous
  August 16, 2006
  Dennis, the metric/US measurement argument has one problem. The US non-metric units were defined by Congress as multiples of metric units.

• Anonymous
  August 16, 2006
  So where is the metric bar for the meter that is used in those standards?  I bet it's not in Paris.  Or do we use some kind of atomic scheme for the dimension now?

• Anonymous
  August 16, 2006
  Dennis,
  
  all seven SI base units (metric units) are defined by measurements of natural phenomena except the kilogram. That still is defined according to a mass that is actually kept in Paris. Scientists haven't been able to come up with a measurable natural phenomenon to replace it yet. A replacement is needed, as a physical prototype can actually lose mass over time (it is speculated that the kilogram prototype has actually lost mass since it was created in the 1880s). For practical reasons, each nation tends to keep a copy of the international kilogram prototype that is calibrated against the international one from time to time.
  By the way, the grounds of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures that keeps the kilogram are considered international territory (similar to the UN in New York), not French territory.
  The meter e.g. though is defined in terms of the distance light travels in a certain amount of time. For all definitions, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SI_base_unit
  For the definitions of the US customary units in SI units, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._customary_unit
  For an interesting history of SI units, see http://www.aticourses.com/international_system_units.htm

• Anonymous
  August 16, 2006
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  August 16, 2006
  Patrick, that's interesting.  It  doesn't alter the existence of multiple standards, but I think it is cool that the SI units are maintained that way, and that U.S. units are referenced to those.

• Anonymous
  August 16, 2006
  Dennis,
  
  Word 2007 has a completely different equation feature (as Brian said, it's really cool). It ships with a list of equations users can choose from. I picked the Binomial Theorem and inserted the equation into a DOCX file. Then I took a look at it.
  The equation was completely represented in XML and it uses this namespace: http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/omml/2004/12/core

• Anonymous
  August 16, 2006
  I agree with Ben Langhinrichs in principle, but I am not sure that the W3C would have ever considered office document requirements for MathML, it being the W3C, after all.  The page at http://www.w3.org/Math/whatIsMathML.html provides this interesting comment:
  
  "MathML is a low-level format for describing mathematics as a basis for machine to machine communication. MathML is not intended for editing by hand, but is for handling by specialized authoring tools such as equation editors, or for export to and from other math packages."
  
  I'm not sure what to make of this, but I can see how Microsoft might have been more comfortable handling the export to and from case in Office 12.
  
  I notice that the OO.o form of the MathML used for my example is of the presentation type, not the semantic type ilustrated lower down on the W3C page.

• Anonymous
  August 16, 2006
  Thanks Patrick.  It is useful to learn that the Word 2007 equation system produces a pure XML element structure for it.
  
  I didn't know what ot expect when I save the Office 2003 document as a .docx, and it is interesting to see that the OLE object used by 2003 is preserved in the beta 2 compatibility conversion to 2007 format.
  
  Not being quite sure where else to go with this, I also imported the Office 2003 .doc file into OO.o (since it doesn't recognize .docx as currently shipped).   Now that I see it, I guess it should be no surprise that when that is saved to ODF both the draw:object and the draw:image are now in binary.

• Anonymous
  August 17, 2006
  Dennis, here's the actual xml for your (a+b)/(a-b) equation in Office 2007.  There was a choice of presentation formats, so I chose "professional", which put it like a math equation in a textbook:
  
  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes" ?>
  <w:document xmlns:ve="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006" xmlns:o="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" xmlns:o12="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/2004/7/core" xmlns:r="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/officeDocument/2006/relationships" xmlns:m="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/omml/2004/12/core" xmlns:v="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:vml" xmlns:wp="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/drawingml/2006/3/wordprocessingDrawing" xmlns:w10="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:word" xmlns:w="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/wordprocessingml/2006/3/main">
  <w:body>
   <w:p>
   <m:oMathPara>
  <m:oMathParaPr>
   <m:jc m:val="centerGroup" />
   </m:oMathParaPr>
   <m:oMath>
  <m:f>
  <m:num>
  <m:r>
  <w:rPr>
   <w:rFonts w:ascii="Cambria Math" w:hAnsi="Cambria Math" />
   </w:rPr>
   <m:t>a+b</m:t>
   </m:r>
   </m:num>
  <m:den>
   <m:r>
   <w:rPr>
   <w:rFonts w:ascii="Cambria Math" w:hAnsi="Cambria Math" />
   </w:rPr>
   <m:t>a-b</m:t>
   </m:r>
   </m:den>
   </m:f>
   </m:oMath>
   </m:oMathPara>
   </w:p>
  <w:sectPr w:rsidR="00A12ECC" w:rsidSect="00407C86">
   <w:pgSz w:w="12240" w:h="15840" />
   <w:pgMar w:top="1440" w:right="1440" w:bottom="1440" w:left="1440" w:header="720" w:footer="720" w:gutter="0" />
   <w:cols w:space="720" />
   <w:docGrid w:linePitch="360" />
   </w:sectPr>
   </w:body>
   </w:document>
  

• Anonymous
  August 17, 2006
  I wonder if the use of the word "modified" in the DTD from ODF that Dennis found,
  
  "-//OpenOffice.org//DTD Modified W3C MathML 1.01//EN"
  
  indicates that ODF 1.0 uses a modified version of MathML.  If so, then the IBM blogs about "Math you can't use" "Making bad choices, over and over again", are pure hypocrisy, since they do exactly what they criticize Microsoft of doing!
  
  Can anyone clarify what "modfied" means in this context?
  

• Anonymous
  August 17, 2006
  To the commenter Bryan,
  
  IE has good support for MathML (better than Mozilla/Firefox) via our free MathPlayer plugin. It supports both Content and Presentation MathML as well as working with screen readers for access by blind users (it speaks the math).
  
  You can see some comparisons here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Blahtex/Bugs_in_browser_MathML_support
  
  Paul

• Anonymous
  August 17, 2006
  Ben L: AT&T is a poor choice of an analogy in this context. AT&T/Bell Labs invented the standards used by the telephone system to this day. These were then, later, turned over to a private industry group (the Administrative Council for Terminal Attachment.
  
  If Microsoft and ECMA represent these players, then all will be well. AT&T's relinquishment of control over the very system it created, i.e. opening of standards, led to a profusion of telecommunications devices, providers, and services.

• Anonymous
  August 17, 2006
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  August 17, 2006
  I did find the math.dtd.  
  
  It is stored in the install location of Open Office 2.0 in subdirectory sharedtdmath1_01 and it is a significant object (35,000 bytes).  It also has a revision history and other comments.  Note that, for interchange purposes, having a location for a relative URL tied to the location of installed software is not exactly workable.  I am sure this will be sorted out over time, but meanwhile many OO.o ODF-format documents are being created with this cruft.
  
  One thing the DTD does is force use of particular QNames for the namespaces (technically, not a requirement in an ODF document or in XML documents generally, and a problem for the OO.o implementation to work its way out of some day).  
  
  [I have not checked to see if Word 2007 is brittle in this same way, but I would be extremely surprised to find such a case, even though Office saves XML files using very compact QNames for performance and file-footprint reasons.]
  
  The comment that seems relevant here is this one:
  
  -- Modifications are intended to ease validation
  -- of MathML files written by StarMath 6.0

• Anonymous
  August 17, 2006
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  August 17, 2006
  Francis - Sorry, I wasn't clear.  It is not AT&T's use of standards for the telephone to which I point, since that is what made AT&T a monopoly.  It was their attitude after being a monopoly for a while when they tried to enter the PC business and couldn't adjust to the competition in that market.  You are quite correct about the durability of the AT&T standards, but I think you will agree that AT&T PC's are not prevelant today.

• Anonymous
  August 17, 2006
  OK, one more update on equations in ODF (er, OO.o) and in Word 2003 - Word 2007 and .docx files.
  
  I finally installed the Office 2007 beta 2 and the first thing I did was open the .docx that I made with Word 2003 and an Equation.3 embedded OLE object.  
  
  Word 2007 beta 2 did three very cool things.  First, when I opened the file, it included the fact that this was a Compatibility Mode situation in the title bar.  Secondly, I got an alert about improvements to the equation system (from a third party) and advice on how to find out more.  Finally, I was adviced that I could convert the .docx to standard mode and it told me what button to click to find out more.
  
  On upgrading to "standard" .docx, I couldn't see any difference.  So I saved the new version (once I found Save As ... ) under a new name.  
  
  I then opened the cleaned-up .docx in Word 2003 and, lo, I still get the Equation.3 OLE embedding that I started with.  
  
  On inspecting the .docx with WinZip and an XML editor, I found the following interesting thing.  The OLE embedding is still being carried (though it has a slightly different size), there is also a .wmf file being carried, apparently for the same image, and there is the vml description of the equation presentation in the document.xml file.  
  
  Although I haven't given this a meticulous examination, it appears that someone has put in a lot of thought about how to get the maximum chance at preserving round-trip use across Office versions while also getting a flavor that works in more-or-less "pure" Office Open XML, all packaged together.  
  
  In a way, OO.o is accomplishing something similar with its use of ODF MathML, although there seems to be insufficient information to accomplish interchange successfully in the actual OO.o document and the ODF specification (and I may well have overlooked something in the ODF spec.)
  
  This little exploration reinforces my admiration for the Open Packaging Conventions though, as well as the maturity of the Microsoft Office team's use of XML as an interchange carrier.

• Anonymous
  August 17, 2006
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  August 18, 2006
  I respect this blog a lot more than for instance the one by Rob weir who censors all comments on his and removes any remotely negative messages on ODF.
  
  I fact not just this blog but in several blogs by Microsoft personel and team I have found that they are much more open towards the internet communities than I had expected.
  
  It is also not like IBM's Rob Weir that has to smuggle his blog postings onto groklaw (never known for their IBM's bias) to get his message to the crowds.
  
  Carry on Brian and give us the much appriciated info on OOXML.
  Btw, do you guys take bets on the size of the documentation that makes it to Ecma standards ;-)
  My guess will be 6453 pages.

• Anonymous
  August 18, 2006
  Patrick made me smile.  I fear that we may be seeing evidence of the intersection of Conway's first law (the structure of a software system reflects the structure of the organization that builds it) and Steele's law (there are only two sizes of software development teams: less than 12 and more than 100 or some numbers like that).  
  
  Architectural incoherence is a great challenge for Microsoft and Office (or Vista) is its existence proof.  What can I say.  
  
  I think the struggle to create a coherent definition of the format is a necessary step to reining in complexity, but it is clearly not sufficient.  I am at a meeting where it has been suggested by some well-known computer scientists tghat the inconsistencies among the current code base are insurmountable and that it will require inconsistency-tolerant software verification techniques to ever conquer.  I have no idea.
  
  PS: I bet the specification shrinks once there are recognized ways to reduce redundancy, rely on diagrams and tables, and otherwise make the treatment of details more compact.  But time pressure might not allow that to occur in the first version.

• Anonymous
  August 19, 2006
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  August 21, 2006
  "If your words were correct (I do not think so) then MathML is a bad technology because an international standard exited before: ISO-12083."
  
  Great. Seems that poor Rob Weir really can't get anything right. Let's see what is his excuse this time - will he come up with a new one, or just rehash his two favorites:
  
  - The magical ODF plug-in now in trials in Massachusssets will solve all problems.
  
  - Everything will be solved in ODF 1.2.
  

• Anonymous
  August 21, 2006
  In response to Juan R's comment and at his request (sort of):
  
  MathML 3.0 may well deprecate some thing in earlier versions. As with any standard, it isn't perfect. MathML has really just started gathering steam. I'm amazed at the growing number of websites that support it. Once math-based search and math accessibility, both enabled by MathML, take hold we will really see wide adoption.
  
  Paul

• Anonymous
  August 21, 2006
  MA has postponed the roll-out of open source applications that default to ODF. The reason is that the current non-MS Office applications do not provide sufficient accessibility. The state is now looking into plugins (presumably for MS Office) to provide ODF capability as a near-term strategy to still use ODF as default:
  http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9002594

• Anonymous
  August 21, 2006
  Concerning "There can be only one", I'm reminded of the standards hoohaa over the internetworking protocols.
  
  Several big networking players had offerings of their own, and the darling of the standardization set was the Open Systems Interconnect.  Meanwhile the TCP/IP stack was establishing itself, although it was far from being the most elaborate and "complete" internetworking stack available.
  
  How many of you use DECNet, IPX/SPX or SNA on a regular basis today?  How many use OSI?  How many use TCP/IP?

• Anonymous
  August 21, 2006
  As far as I can think sanely "if some open standard is not up to mark for some related purpose" then the best approach to do is work with "that standardization body" and "other groups" working on similar issues and then come up with a consensus  solution which can be adopted into the standard as well as used by all concerned parties.
  This way the world is saved from one more standard as well as everyone can coexist happyly and ethically without getting bogged down by business or commercial motives.
  
  

• Anonymous
  August 22, 2006
  Paul Topping I desire you good luck with your idyllic vision of MathML.
  
  I have updated a Canonical Science Today entry with comments on MathML and the new Microsoft format. It can be accessed in
  
  [http://canonicalscience.blogspot.com/2006/08/microsoft-avoids-mathml-in-office-xml.html]
  
  I do not know details of the new format for mathematics, but I am glad to see solid points in above piece of markup are present in other markup languages such as ISO-12083 and XML-MAIDEN, also adopted in the proposal for HTML5-Math discussed at WHATWG; points are not present in MathML.
  
  I also review both Rob Weir and Bob Sutor postings about MathML format and add some basic thoughts about fiasco of OO to correctly render a simple piece of math recently reported by Rob Weir:
  
  [http://www.robweir.com/blog/2006/08/demo-mathematica-mathml-and-odf.html]
  
  Juan R.
  
  Center for CANONICAL |SCIENCE)
  

• Anonymous
  August 22, 2006
  sorry but the previous link to blog archive is not working due to internal bug of system. The archive can be currently accessed from the root,
  
  [http://canonicalscience.blogspot.com/]
  
  the comments link do not work neither but you can send my comments to my personal e-mail.
  
  Juan R.
  
  Center for CANONICAL |SCIENCE)

• Anonymous
  August 22, 2006
  Sorry by writting again Brian Jones!
  
  The problem with root access to the article on MathML and Office MML is that the article will be automatically eliminated by the blog software in a near future when the root changes due to recent additions. This does your readers have a limited time to accessing that archive from the blog root.
  
  Fortunately, i am able to do the August archive working now and a permanent link would be next
  
  [http://canonicalscience.blogspot.com/2006_08_01_canonicalscience_archive.html]
  
  Sorry by inconveniences!
  
  Juan R.
  
  Center for CANONICAL |SCIENCE)

• Anonymous
  August 22, 2006
  No problem Juan, thanks for all the information.
  
  Thanks everyone for all the great comments and feedback. This is a really good discussion.
  
  My wife and I just celebrated our 2nd anniversary yesterday, and as you can imagine I haven't been quite as active on the blog. I'll try to read through everything and see if there is need for another post on this topic.
  
  We also had the Ecma TC45 face-to-face meetings last week, so I aslo want to talk a bit about that. We're getting really close!
  
  -Brian

• Anonymous
  August 22, 2006
  Congratulations, Brian! :)

• Anonymous
  August 22, 2006
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  August 23, 2006
  David,
  
  That was me.  I dug deeper into the MathML material on the W3C web site after that, and I agree that the objective would appear to be accomodation of document embedding and I would hope that the recently-initiated MathML 3.0 effort will get into that.  
  
  I notice that ODF includes math:math as an element and referencs the MathML 2.0 specification, but there is nothing but a couple of sentences and a (prose) reference to the specification.  The ODF schema does not specify or quality how the MathML schema is blended into that of the host document.  
  
  My sense of MathML 2.0 is that it is strongly focused on the specific goals of support in web pages and browser functionality, and its examples are predominanty oriented to XHTML.  
  
  Do you have some sense for what would be done to allow hosting of MathML in other documents and document models that may require injection and comingling of host elements and attributes in the MathML material, or is it to remain an island with transformation in and out of document models by linking to isolated MathML content?

• Anonymous
  August 23, 2006
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  August 24, 2006
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  August 24, 2006
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  September 05, 2006
  The Open Document movement, from the OASIS industry consortium, is slowly but surely wresting Microsoft's market dominance in word and spreadsheet applications. The Oasis consortium is formed by government and public institutions around the world, as

• Anonymous
  September 05, 2006
  The Open Document movement, from the OASIS industry consortium, is slowly but surely wresting Microsoft's market dominance in word and spreadsheet applications. The Oasis consortium is formed by government and public institutions around the world, as

• Anonymous
  September 08, 2006
  Some really interesting things to note for the week:
  New blog on Math in Office – Murray Sargent who...

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