Format Comparison Between ODF and MS XML (Groklaw) [LWN.net]

Format Comparison Between ODF and MS XML (Groklaw)

Posted Dec 4, 2005 16:24 UTC (Sun) by dps (subscriber, #5725)
In reply to: Format Comparison Between ODF and MS XML (Groklaw) by gjheydon
Parent article: Format Comparison Between ODF and MS XML (Groklaw)

MS XML does not look very like the binary .doc format---where are the completely seperate pointers into the text that mark which bits are bold, italic, etc? It actually looks a lot easier to generate from a template than anything else you can edit in M$ office moudlo HTML.

My target format of choice is LaTeX with portions of plain TeX that goes way beyond Dr. Lamport's gnats and gnus are likely to have imagined. The current version of the editting angle is to apply one of the (commercial) PDF to M$ word conversion programs out there.

Human readability is important if you want to generate a document from a template and neither RTF nor open office scores well by this metric---I could not simply expand a template in either format such that the result did not crash openoffice. (I suspect exploit potential if you tickle whatever my results tickled in the right manner).

As an ISO standard M$ will have to drop some of its stipulations, like not using their documentation to design your own word processor format, not that anyone sane would want to do that anyway. Actually using the format as in memory format makes even less sense but is probably what M$ word does...

(Log in to post comments)