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Phipps: Apple and Google and ODF
Simon Phipps notes
that in Latvia (and other European countries) governments must accept
documents in ODF format, and bemoans the lack of ODF support from Apple and
Google. "So I remain surprised that neither Apple nor Google are
taking ODF support seriously. Apple still don't support ODF in their
applications (despite it being available in their TextEdit gadget on Mac OS
X) or the iPhone or iPad, and the ODF support in Google Docs is so weak
that documents I try to upload from LibreOffice are routinely rejected in
ODF and yet accepted if I save the identical document in .doc format. It's
ironic that the best proprietary ODF support right now is from
Microsoft." (Thanks to Davide Del Vento)
(Log in to post comments)
Phipps: Apple and Google and ODF Posted Jan 18, 2011 23:17 UTC (Tue) by dmitrij.ledkov (subscriber, #63320) [Link]
In Latvia you can submit any documents to government online, as long as it is signed using e-me smartcard. Which is what looks to be using java toolkit, only works on Windows, uses a proprietary "signed bundle" format and drivers for smartcard-readers. The whole solution is provided by Microsoft and you have to pay if you want a verified timestamp from the e-me servers.
The advertisement had Macbooks pictured in them.....
Phipps: Apple and Google and ODF Posted Jan 19, 2011 0:36 UTC (Wed) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link]
>It's ironic that the best proprietary ODF support right now is from Microsoft.
Well, after 10+ years of being bashed, they gotta be good for and at something, don't they? ;-)
What makes me wonder why latex did not become a standard. After all, it can seemingly express everything a normal document could. The latex-esque RTF did make an appearance after all already, so what's the hurdle to go completely latex?
Phipps: Apple and Google and ODF Posted Jan 19, 2011 3:53 UTC (Wed) by maney (subscriber, #12630) [Link]
I was thinking of addressing the same point, but more seriously. It's not really ironic at all, just a predictable result of market conditions. Think about it: of Microsoft, Apple and Google, which one has been being threatened with having its profitable Office monopoly bypassed by governments, schools, and everyone's dog on the grounds that it doesn't support an open format? So why would it surprise anyone that that company has interoperability sooner/better than the others, who are still plucking low-hanging fruit (Google) or... well, not knowing a thing about Apple's "office" tools, I assume they're not much focused on interoperability - they play where having the Apple name is more important than any specs, yes?
Not "ironic", but "inevitable"? Looks that way in this rear-view mirror...
Phipps: Apple and Google and ODF Posted Jan 19, 2011 3:53 UTC (Wed) by njs (guest, #40338) [Link]
Latex is.. well... not computer readable, basically. It's a bunch of totally unstructured code in a Turing-complete language. So given some well-defined data structure representing a document, you can generate Latex code that will display the same way. But given some arbitrary latex code, you can't load it into a WYSIWYG system and edit it. (Notice that LyX, say, generates Latex for output but uses its own format for saving documents.)
It's the same reason everyone switched from PS to PDF -- either works fine to send to a printer, but PDFs are a heck of a lot easier to do anything else with.
Phipps: Apple and Google and ODF Posted Jan 19, 2011 14:05 UTC (Wed) by droundy (subscriber, #4559) [Link]
Yeah. It's sort of sad, though, that some simplified variant or standardized subset of latex didn't come into existence and gain popularity. It'd be lovely to have a widely-supported file format that was designed first to be both human-writable, and high-level (e.g. footnoting and automatic numbering, etc... unlike HTML).
Phipps: Apple and Google and ODF Posted Jan 19, 2011 15:13 UTC (Wed) by jreiser (subscriber, #11027) [Link] What is stopping you from preparing a proposal, submitting it to your favorite standards body, shepherding the creation of a working group, becoming its chairperson, and working to create such a standard?
Phipps: Apple and Google and ODF Posted Jan 19, 2011 16:15 UTC (Wed) by Trelane (subscriber, #56877) [Link]
hahahaha. Nice parody. :)
Surprised? Posted Jan 21, 2011 21:38 UTC (Fri) by whitemice (guest, #3748) [Link]
I don't see how this is surprising. At the end of the day only Open systems and solutions [which by-no-stretch describe Apple or Google] have a genuine interest in Open standards and real interoperability. You get pretty good interoperability so long as the playing field is reasonably level [see how well IMAP works] but "the cloud" and the its silo solutions are un-leveling that very quickly.
What Open Source gave, the cloud will almost certainly take away.
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