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Microsoft: Boiling Frogs Since 1975Microsoft: Boiling Frogs Since 1975Posted Apr 16, 2012 23:05 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)In reply to: Microsoft: Boiling Frogs Since 1975 by anselm Parent article: Paoli: Microsoft will engage with the open source and standards communities
Have you checked the recent ODF standard with all referenced standards? It's far more than 7000 pages.
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Microsoft: Boiling Frogs Since 1975 Posted Apr 16, 2012 23:31 UTC (Mon) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] Yes, but most of that (like the XML specification) is independently useful. Where I come from, building on other existing standards is generally considered a Good Thing™. On the other hand, Microsoft apparently came up with enough new stuff for OOXML – stuff that does not appear to be standardised elsewhere – for them to take 7000 pages to write it all down. If you add pre-existing stuff like the XML specification, which the OOXML standard also references but does not actually include, the document set gets bigger still.
Microsoft: Boiling Frogs Since 1975 Posted Apr 17, 2012 1:15 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
>Yes, but most of that (like the XML specification) is independently useful
Yeah? How about SVG which has exactly _zero_ fully-conforming renderers? And now they've decided to play the favorite OpenSource game and rewrite SVG 2.0 almost from scratch. I've worked with VML back in early 2000-s and it was many times easier to write a simple renderer for it.
Then there are questions of CSS in ODF, but my comments would be unprintable.
Frankly, supporting a subset of OOXML without crazy magic formatting options has about the same complexity as supporting ODF. Except that OOXML is internally more consistent.
Now, OOXML is clearly not ideal. But it's OK-ish, and ISO quite fairly standardized it on its technical merits.
Microsoft: Boiling Frogs Since 1975 Posted Apr 17, 2012 5:33 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] Except that OOXML is internally more consistent. Only someone with agenda can claim that these three lines (which mark test as red in .docx, .xlsx and .pptx) are consistent: No, OOXML is most definitely not consistent. It encodes warts of all the legacy documents quite well (as it was the goal of it's creation) but consistency? Not in the cards. It was not the goal of it's creators, thus you hardly can fault them. Now, OOXML is clearly not ideal. But it's OK-ish, and ISO quite fairly standardized it on its technical merits. Note: I never said it. OOXML is internal Microsoft's format and it's one of the better documented proprietary formats. Usually ISO was quite reluctant to standardize such things because, frankly, they have only limited appeal for anyone except the primary author. Usually just some subset was standardized (such as PDF/X, PDF/A, PDF/E, PDF/VT, or PDF/UA). The fact the full pig was pushed through ISO tarnishes it's reputation in IT industry beyond repair, but this is separate issue from the standard's technical quality.
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